


Chaos and Codependency - A Case Study

by SincerelyChaos



Series: Floodgates 'verse [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (without any actual negotiation), Addiction, Asexuality Spectrum, Autism Spectrum, Bondage, Borderline Personality Disorder, Codependency, Depression, Developing Relationship, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, Falling In Love, Homophobia, Illustrations of psychiatric & psychological terminology through fiction, Internalized Homophobia, Kink Negotiation, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Painplay, Past Drug Use, Past Relationship(s), Post-The Hounds of Baskerville, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Destructive Behavior, Self-Harm, Sensory integration, Sexuality, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-30 02:03:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 54,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3918760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SincerelyChaos/pseuds/SincerelyChaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Not this again.” John’s voice shows exasperation. “We’ve been through this. I am not leaving just because you say so. If we are to repeat this whole thing again, can we please skip the parts where you’re slamming doors and disappearing for days and go straight to the part where we make out?”</p><p>And that is it, really. This is what had kept Sherlock from resorting to chemical solutions a few nights ago. This is proof that Sherlock might be as fucked up as you get, but John Watson isn’t far behind. And it isn’t that John doesn’t know what he is doing at this point. At this point, he knows enough to make any sane person leave without looking back. John, on the other hand, stays and makes black jokes about it.</p><p>* * * * *</p><p>In which love is not a solution, codependency might not always be the worst option and chaos is slightly similar to 'sense of belonging'. This is perhaps (not?) a love story, but it's also a story that attempts to illustrate psychological or psychiatric terms and theories. Most of all, it's a story about how to attempt love when your mind is less than prepared for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cognitive Dissonance

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly a new sequence of A Study in Floodgates, but reading Floodgates first is not that necessary. 
> 
> The premise of Floodgates is basically that two men attempts a form of relationship (mostly consisting of awkward sex, confusion, fears and self-denial) in order to 'save the friendship' after Sherlock finds that he's attracted to John, and demands that he moves out in order to prevent problems. It works just like you would expect; it's a mess.
> 
> *
> 
> Every chapter attempts to illustrate some term or aspect of psychiatry or psychology, and there's an explaination in the end of every chapter. Feel free to agree or disagree with my use of these aspects; I'm always up for an interesting discussion about these topics, which might or might not be a kind of special interest for me.
> 
> Not a native speaker of The English Language; feel free to point out any mistakes, I'm only grateful. The wonderful and encouraging iriswallpaper does wonders with my texts; without her beta skills this would not be the same! 
> 
> Finally; This is a story that deals with many, many mental health issues. Please read tags and possible warnings in the beginnings of some of the chapters.

“Are you alright?”

John’s voice is obscured by Sherlock’s skin as John’s lips are just an inch away from the tendons of his neck. John's breath is hot against his skin, but the skin is damp with saliva and the warmth is soon replaced by the slight chill of evaporation.

Sherlock is not sure if he’s alright, but that’s not the kind of answer you give when you want someone to touch you, to let you touch them and then moan into their mouth, so answering truthfully isn't an option. Lying isn't an option either, because Sherlock finds lying dull and unimaginative. Therefore, Sherlock settles for his usual solution; ignoring the real meaning of the question and answering something more relevant instead.

“I’d like you to, yes.”

And every time it happens, Sherlock is slightly amazed. John understands his insinuation, even if it wasn’t even relevant to the question asked. John tightens his grip in Sherlock’s hair and his lips leave Sherlock’s neck and invade his mouth instead. The grip on his hair is pressing the back of Sherlock’s head into the sofa cushion with more intent now, pinning it while the weight of John’s body over Sherlock's is pressing the rest of him down as well, holding him there.

Sherlock doesn’t mean to let that sound out, the sound that without a doubt communicates his bent to being touched like this. It’s not something he wishes to communicate, because it’s not who he wants to be in front of John, but it’s all he wants to feel in these situations.

It does, however, seem to serve a purpose, because John’s movements grow bolder, and that’s something that Sherlock will always want. The feeling of John taking what he wants, directing this to his own liking, using Sherlock to meet his needs. It’s intoxicating, and it’s abandon. It does make sense, in that context, because giving John something that he wants is logical if Sherlock wants to do this again. And he does. But if Sherlock is honest with himself he'll also acknowledge that such ulterior motives rarely surfaces when he’s under the influence of the dopamine, ephidephrine and endorphins that's currently flooding his blood. No, the gain of giving John something that he’ll want  again is secondary to his own need to feel John take it from him. He’s not quite sure what ‘it’ is, but it might be control, responsibility for John’s pleasure and the logistics of these things.

Because in this, John is a natural leader, a pathmaker, and Sherlock is an overwhelmed child in a candy shop, too excited and filled with cravings to know where to begin and how to portion out his indulgence. And Sherlock is very rarely a follower, but in this he allows himself to be just that.

One of John’s hands leaves the curls and shifts down the side of Sherlock’s neck. Just for a second, it flattens out, pressing its palm over his Adam’s apple and trachea before it resumes its path down the sternum. Sherlock takes a sharp intake of breath, and John’s hand leaves his chest to work on the buttons of Sherlock’s shirt. Hips are bucking up without his conscious mind's permission, and John will perhaps never know what that seemingly innocent lingering over the trachea does to his friend.

And John’s tongue alternates between licking the inside of Sherlock’s mouth and fucking it. It’s an invasion of the most prominent kind, and Sherlock guards his boundaries, but he’s no stranger to abandon; he’s an addict and addiction tends to do that to you. So abandoning to sensation in this might achieve a similar purpose as other things he’s abandoned himself to. It should be a warning sign, it should be the thought that makes him break and throw John off of him, but somewhere in his mind, Sherlock rationalizes that since he’s given up the safety of being able to resort to other abandons, he ought to be allowed this instead.

 

* * *

 

The night before, while John was at his shift at the A&E, Sherlock had gotten up to look in the kitchen cupboard next to the sink, the one where his bottles, flasks and petri dishes were stacked. In the yellow glow from the street lights flooding in through the windows everything in the cupboard had looked just as it had done three days ago, with one exception; the space where an old, wooden box usually occupied was now empty. Sherlock stood for a while and just looked at the space on the second shelf where the box had been just four days ago, when he’d almost taken it out and… _no_.

Of course he’d known that the box wouldn’t still be there. Logically, he’d known. He’d told John about the box, and given John’s character and profession, it would be highly unlikely that he’d let a box containing illegal drugs remain in the possession of an ex-addict. Still, as long as Sherlock hadn’t opened the cupboard, he couldn’t be quite sure that the box was actually  gone. It was a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, but in this case it was ‘Sherlock’s cocaine’ that was the object or conception in question. And now he knew that there wasn’t a cat in the box, and no box in the cupboard. What he didn’t know, however, was if he ought to be relieved or distressed, but he found that his brain settled on feeling none of those emotions. Instead of reacting, his mind blanked. Sherlock stared at the empty shelf, trying to react, but failing to doing so. It was just an empty space on a shelf, and emptiness wasn't something new to him. 

 

* * *

 

Sherlock doesn’t like the sensation that the loss of John’s weight on his torso causes, but he likes the sight he gets of John twisting his way out of his shirt, still straddling Sherlock’s hips. And the sensation as John is once again pressed against his whole body is now different; their position hasn't changed, but the feeling has. Now it's skin shifting against skin, muscles moving under a thin layer of subcutaneous fat tissue and the sensation of humidity and warmth is no longer obscured by the discomfort of seams and buttons pressed into his skin.

John’s mouth is lapping the side of his neck and John’s hand is moving over his pectorals, his sternum, his clavicles and pressing fingers into his skin. Sherlock’s own hands are mapping the skin of John’s back, feeling every scar, feeling the muscles shift as John breathes heavily and the muscles enable John’s hands and mouth to reach new areas of Sherlock’s skin. It’s beautiful, feeling the beginning of the movement, blunt and unspecific, in the muscles of John’s back, and the result in the fine and controlled movements of hands and lips. If Sherlock could also feel how John’s brain starts the signaling that is sent down his spinal cord, reaching his peripheral nervous system, crossing synapses and finally reaching the muscles of John’s lips, making every little movement and shift so precise and exquisite, he’d never need anything else. The mystery of the human mind would be there, under his fingertips, and he’d never need any other experiments.

Sherlock shudders at the thought as it once again hits him. The thought that this is it; this is what he’s been so afraid of, and now it’s out there, now it’s acknowledged, at least to himself. Sherlock is in love, and it’s perhaps Not Good, but John said that he could deal with a bit of Not Good, if that was what it took to figure this out. At least then they’d know. Sherlock isn’t sure if John ever understood the possible magnitude of ‘a bit Not Good’ when they spoke of it in the beginning of… this. It was weeks ago, and Sherlock hadn’t thought that ‘being in love’ was a possibility, that it was something he was able to experience. Something similar, yes; he’d felt something similar once or twice, but it was darker than what other people would suggest ‘being in love’ was. But since the afternoon when John had found him in the bathroom, and then followed him to the rooftop, he’s been forced to admit that this might just be it, that this might be what people talked about. And Sherlock hated feeling things that other people could relate to since it made the feelings seem simple and irrational.

‘Being in love’ is not something that he ought to feel; it’d led to… things, things that are no longer deleted. Things that are rather unpleasant to think about. And last time he had to think about those things - over a decade ago - he used chemical solutions to take the edge of those thoughts. That chemical solution led to other things that are equally unpleasant to think about, but right now that feels rather secondary to the relief that the solution could offer. The consequences would be a later problem, anyway. But he had told John about the box, and John had removed it. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get more cocaine, but the act of removing the box was symbolic; it had been a ‘just in case’ solution, a ‘worst case scenario’ solution, and now he’s eliminated that escape route.

“Up,” John says insistently, and Sherlock realises that John’s unfastened his trousers and is now pushing at his hips, trying to make him lift them so that John can pull the trousers down.

Sherlock obliges, and the pressure against his body lessens as John lifts himself off in order to pull off Sherlock’s trousers, leaving him in only the unbuttoned shirt, his chest stripped of the fabric. John is back on top of him, but he’s still wearing his own jeans, and even though they’re well-washed and worn, the fabric is rough enough to cause considerable friction against Sherlock’s bare thighs. He’s not sure if it’s a good sensation or not, but John is pressing his erection against Sherlock’s, and that makes every other sensation fade. It’s almost painful, the jeans and the belt and the roughness of John’s rutting movements against his own cock, the sensitive skin exposed.

As John slips his hand back into Sherlock’s hair and his other hand ghosts downwards, Sherlock feels a surge of unease. He shouldn’t be allowing this, this is not right. He should not let John do this, not now that he knows why John does it; that John’s afraid of being without Sherlock and therefore willing to expose his own body to something he isn’t really inclined to, just to prevent that from happening. But he allows it, he lets this happen. And that breaks all his moral codes, his own structure of interactions, his sense of…

“No,” he breathes, unsure of how he managed to form the words. “You don’t have to, I don’t…”

John stops in his movements, looking up from Sherlock’s clavicles, cheeks flushed, lips more blood filled than Sherlock’s ever seen them. His eyes hazy, but still clear in their unspoken question.

“I don’t want you to… I don’t want us to do this, not anymore. You don’t have to, it’s idiotic.”

His voice holds none of the steadiness such a statement ought to, instead it holds the conflict he feels as he utter the words.

“It’s idiotic, is it?” John wonders, clearing his throat.

“I told you, you are an idiot to do this because you fear…”

“This is not fear,” John interrupts. “Or; it is, but not over what you think it is. This scares me, but I don’t do it because I’m scared. It’s because I… want to. Need to.”

Sherlock doesn’t believe him. His mind is filled with the possible consequences of this and John’s words can’t override all that tumult.

“Look at me,” John urges, his tone now clear.

Sherlock does, because when John uses that kind of voice, that’s what people do. They obey. John is looking at him with a frown, trying to read him.

“Do you not want to do this?” John asks after a few seconds of very heavy silence.

Sherlock does. He wants it, and he wants it more and dirtier and closer and harder and rougher and more bare. But it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. Because if the cost is being just what people tell him that he is - a freak - then it’s not worth it; a few minutes of sensation for a lifetime of proving that they’re right.

John’s expression loses some of it’s sharpness, then regains it. He tightens his grip on Sherlock’s hair again until it's almost painfully hard. John's looking at him, and Sherlock fights not to let his eyes tear up from the sharp pull on his scalp.

“Will you ever respect that some choices are mine to make and that you don’t dictate the all of the terms and impose them on me? Will you ever let go of your megalomania long enough to do that?”

With that, the conversation is apparently over, at least on John’s part, because John breaks the eye contact after a few seconds, and then there’s teeth against Sherlock’s nipple, and when he lets his hand fall to his side, getting ready to stop John, there’s a strong grip around his wrist, pinning it down to the sofa. John’s mouth leaves his skin, and it aches as John once again looks at him.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Sherlock doesn’t. He wants to want John to stop, but he doesn’t. The hold on his hair makes shaking his head difficult, but he manages. He doesn’t want to ever know what his face must be displaying at this moment, because he is rather certain that it won’t be something appropriate or confident. Sherlock needs a lot of things, and one of them is to never feel needy.

“If you ever do, you say so. Like I would have done, if I didn’t.”

The pain in his nipple returns, and the sounds he make might be both needy and slightly helpless. John shouldn’t want this, but he says he does, and Sherlock’s denied John too many things to deny him this. Even if it’s Not Good. Being in love is miserable, he concludes, because he’s probably been in love for a long time, and it’s led to all of this cognitive dissonance; all this distress over how the ideas and values he holds are now contradicting themselves on a daily basis. And it’s downright miserable and too addictive to give up.

His wrist is released, and his hand presses into John’s hair, letting himself indulge in how the rather short strands of hair feels against his palm, the sharpness of the recently cut ends of each hair pinching his skin as a benevolent needle. John’s hand is suddenly too close to where Sherlock wants it, where he needs it, and he tries to make some room between their bodies, so John’s hand can reach in and touch his cock, but John doesn’t, he keeps himself pressed against Sherlock’s pelvis, rutting as his hand traces a buttock, the cease between the buttock and the thigh, kneading muscles. Then, without any form of warning, John leans to the side, creating the necessary space for his hand to stroke iliac crests and the scar tissue on Sherlock’s thigh, and Sherlock hates that. He doesn’t, however, hate how John is still pressed against half his body and he doesn’t hate the hand that’s now between his thighs, fingering his testicles. If he tilts his head up just a bit, he could see John, see his fingers on Sherlock’s body, but he can’t, it’s too indulgent and too much and…

John grabs his free hand and places it on the buckle of his belt, pressing it to the metal. Sherlock begins to fumble with it, feeling his fingers shake. The unzipping of John’s jeans keeps Sherlock focused, but when John’s hand returns to the inside of his thighs, the focus is slightly diverted. John's hand is nudging his legs apart, reaching in between, cradling the testicles once more, fingering them, rolling them. It’s dizzying, and the only thing that's keeping Sherlock from getting lost in the sensations of it all is the mission of getting to John’s… Oh.

His fingers close awkwardly around the part of John’s cock that he can now reach. John's jeans are unzipped and his hand is under the elastic of John’s pants. John doesn’t seem to appreciate the awkward angle either, because his hand leaves Sherlock and quickly pushes his jeans and pants down to his thighs before he returns to Sherlock’s skin, once again feeling the fading, white lines of scar tissue that makes the skin feel a bit like it was lined with thick threads.

There's a pressure against his perineum, and John’s hand is no longer on the damaged skin, it's further down between Sherlock’s thighs, it's passing the perineum, tracing the cleft, and Sherlock must have stopped breathing, because suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen in his lungs. John hesitates, and Sherlock can only guess that John's now looking up at his face, because Sherlock won’t open his eyes, not now, perhaps never. It's too intense, and adding vision to the flood of sensory data isn't a possibility, not if he wants to stay in his body instead of flooding out of every nerve ending in his entire nervous system. He lets out the breath he's been holding, but it doesn’t sound like an exhale, it sounds filthier and more needy, and he’s never known that an exhale could sound needy.

John's still, and Sherlock doesn’t want him to be, so he lets his own hand feel every inch of John’s cock, fingering the foreskin that's retracting, feeling the dampness and the wrinkled skin. And he tightens his fingers, encircling, stroking. John’s breath becomes faster, and there's a slight tremor in the hand that's still unmoving with its fingers on the cleft of Sherlock’s buttocks.

“Slower... a bit harder,” John says with a somewhat strained voice.

John bucks his hips, as if he can’t fully control them, and it's giddying, knowing that John finds self-control to be hard as well and because of him. And when John’s fingers finally begins to move, Sherlock's no longer feeling giddy, he's ashamed and lost and desperate and oversensitive; the implications of that hand at that place is almost too much, but the touch in it self isn't.

Trying to focus on his own movement on John’s cock, Sherlock tries to remember what he likes himself, but it's somehow lost in the electric feeling of a finger that's now circling his anus, light and without really touching the rim.

Sherlock wants to transfer at least some of that feeling to John, but his own movements feel rigid and even the rhythm of his strokes falters. He finds himself gripping harder, without intending to.

“You like this?”

John’s voice breaks the compact flood of sensations just enough so that Sherlock can make out the words. His friend’s voice is almost teasing, but it's too breathy to convey any real sense of bicker. And Sherlock’s voice would probably be too thin and needy to allow any kind of dignity, so he doesn’t even attempt to articulate; he just lets some sort of approving, uncommitted sound answer. It doesn’t come out uncommitted, however, it comes out desperate, and if he hadn’t already felt his skin burn with all the dilated blood vessels, he’d be afraid that John would see how his cheeks burns even more.

The sound is swallowed as John’s mouth hits his. It's a slightly strained angle, with John’s head so much further down, but it works, and there's contact and saliva and warmth. Sherlock leans his head towards John's mouth, and the dual sensation of kissing and having John's fingers now pressing and testing the resistance of the rim of his sphincter makes him forget all about moving his own hand. Then John's fingers leaves him, and instead of pressing against his anus they're now pressed to his lips, breaking the kiss and inserting themselves into Sherlock's mouth. It's strange, until it dawns on Sherlock that he might be expected to... ah. Yes.

He sucks the fingers that are intruding in his mouth and the skin is harder there than on most of the other places Sherlock has tasted, and the taste is sharper. And John has put two of his fingers in his mouth, keeping them there, making him suck them, and the implications of that gesture aren’t lost on him. Letting his tongue swirl around them, sucking and dragging his teeth along them, he uses the data from some of his more recent studies on human sexuality to imitate the act of fellatio. He’s researched, because even if John seems to enjoy what they've done so far, he knows that some technique might be useful in future encounters.

The fingers are suddenly drawn from his mouth and replaced by John's mouth, and the difference in warmth, wetness and reciprocation is breathtaking. And John takes Sherlock's breath, holding it hostage as a saliva coated finger circles and pushes against his anus once more. But John isn't only taking; he’s also giving back, breathing into Sherlock’s mouth, which shouldn’t be possible, but obviously is, because John is doing it, and John is brilliant and Sherlock’s not so brilliant in this, but he’s more than willing to become.

There’s a thrust against his hand, and it reminds him that he’s still holding John’s cock. Surprised, he realises that he must have stopped stroking minutes ago, and just held on to it since then. The urging thrusts of John’s hips makes him readjust his hold on John, beginning to stroke again, moving his hand along the length, twisting his wrist slightly going up. The eagerness of John’s thrusts make the movements uncoordinated, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because there’s precome leaking and John’s breathing harder before he once again stills his hips, letting Sherlock continue working his cock. Sherlock will focus, will not dissolve into John’s touch this time, because John Watson evaporating from Sherlock’s touch is possibly one of the achievements Sherlock would actually strive for.

The pressure increases until his body accepts the intrusion and John’s finger enters his body. Sherlock’s done this before, but only to himself. The unpredictability of someone else’s hands adds a thrill that could never be transferred to the act of doing this to himself. He forces himself not to give in to the tension, not to falter in rhythm in his own strokes on John. His own cock is aching, and he might be rutting with his hips into the air when he’s not aware enough to control his own movements.

John breaks the kiss, breathing too hard, the last moments of the kiss have been more pressing of open mouths against each other than actual kissing. And as Sherlock feels how his sphincter slowly relaxes, John presses a bit further, than halts at the pressure that once again increases. Sherlock wonders if he ought to stop stroking John, if John wants to… in him? But that doesn’t make sense, because John isn't gay, and anal penetration with another man is a rather homosexual act. Even Sherlock knows this, and he’s not that ajour with contemporary sexuality. The thought and the contradiction in this is distressing, because even if there’s no genitals involved, John’s still penetrating him, and Sherlock can’t see why John would want to, because John’s admitted that the fact that Sherlock’s a man is somewhat new and a bit uncomfortable to him, and Sherlock hates that, hates the thought of John being uncomfortable. The most confusing thing, however, is the fact that John initiated this, that John breathes hard and seems to take some form of pleasure from penetrating an anus with his finger. It doesn’t make sense, but it feels sensical. No, it doesn’t; it feels intense, insane, invasive, incredible....

There’s a harsh cry, and John’s body’s stiffening. Sherlock feels how John’s cock swells just before he feels the hot liquid against his thigh, his fingers and his hip. And he manages to open his eyes, because he needs to see this.

John’s face is almost pained, frowning with all the wrinkles prominent from the tension. He’s thrusting into Sherlock’s hand again, and Sherlock keeps stroking, unsure of when to stop. Perhaps he won’t stop at all. He could hold on, if his arm wasn’t cramping a bit by now. And John’s body’s as tense as his face, the hand still holding a fistful of curls is now almost painful again, and the finger inside Sherlock is pushing further, meeting resistance, but pressing on. It’s a bit painful, that too, but it’s not important, because it’s in him, it’s insisting and that is all Sherlock wants; the almost-pain and the lack of control, the submission to someone else’s need and body. And when John pants heavy and no more come is running down Sherlock’s hand John’s hand leave his hair and finds Sherlock’s cock.

It’s too intense to finally have John’s hand there, to have friction, a fist to buck into and if Sherlock’s making any undignified noises, he’s too lost to care about it.

John’s hand manages only a few strokes before Sherlock feels the tightness in his pelvis, feels something threaten to burst, feels his own body tense up, feverishly thrusting up into John’s hand and pushing John’s finger further in opposite movements. Then the release comes, and it’s such a break of tension that he shakes as he keeps thrusting, distantly feeling a finger being clenched inside him, distantly hearing himself groan.

John works his hand on him until Sherlock’s body melts down the sofa, limbs heavy and trembling. It hurts as John’s finger leaves him, but that’s not the most distressing feeling the movement causes. The weight of John’s body over the right half of his body is grounding and too warm and reassuring and stressing, all at once.

Being in love is miserable, Sherlock manages to conclude as he feels John slump against him, unmoving and heavy. Being in love - if that’s what this is - is contradictory, and Sherlock does not like internal contradictions. But he likes the way his body feels now. The tremor is disturbing, and the feeling of loss as John’s finger left him was unpredicted, but mostly his body feels right. His mind, however, is a battlefield of what he wants and what he wants to want, and it would probably be intolerable, if he hadn’t been so hazed and so weighted down by his John's body.

He can handle the internal chaos for a few more minutes, as long as he can feel the weight on him and his brain is flooded by oxytocin, prolactin and endorphins.

For now, he’s alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cognitive Dissonance according to Wikipedia:
> 
> In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.
> 
> Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. When inconsistency (dissonance) is experienced, individuals tend to become psychologically uncomfortable and they are motivated to attempt to reduce this dissonance, as well as actively avoiding situations and information which are likely to increase it.
> 
> * * * *
> 
> Cognitive Dissonance in this chapter:
> 
> The biggest dissonance in this chapter might be the contradiction between what Sherlock’s been aspiring to do for over a decade; keeping away from any sentimental or romantic feelings towards another person, which he fears will make him obsessive and capable of inflicting distress and harm to the object (as he came to believe that it did with Samuel, an experience that shaped a significant part of Sherlock’s self-perceptions regarding the relationship to other people) and the overwhelming desire to give in, to allow himself to do this, to have this with John.
> 
> There’s, however, several other cognitive dissonances as well. Here’s a few of them;
> 
> \- Sherlock’s notion that John is straight, and his knowledge of the fact that the physical aspects of what they’re doing sometimes makes John a bit distressed, contradicted by the fact that John initiates not only the sex, but the anal fingering, which Sherlock sees as a very ‘gay’ form of sexual act.
> 
> \- The contradiction between what Sherlock wants sexually and what he thinks is appropriate and safe to display
> 
> \- Sherlock believes that the right thing to do is to abstain from more sex with John, because he can’t stand the idea of John only doing it because he’s afraid of losing their friendship. But he can’t abstain, and the conflict is complicated by John’s words about letting him decide for himself, which is something Sherlock wants to believe in, since he’s aware that his perception of interpersonal interaction isn’t the norm, and he trusts John with such issues more than he trusts himself in the same issues.
> 
> \- Sherlock’s belief that he’s imposing himself on John, that he’s forcing John into this, and that John will find him repulsive (based on his experience last time he desired someone, which was also someone who was his friend and viewed himself as straight, which ended… badly) and John’s insistence that he too wants this.  
>  
> 
> The definitions of what conflicts can cause a cognitive dissonance seems to differ a bit between professionals, but I choose to use the widest definitions, allowing feelings as well as beliefs, ideas and values. There’s surely more dissonances in this chapter, and better wordings than in my short examples above, so feel free to add anything I’ve missed, if you like, because I rather adore new data in these topics.


	2. Impulse Control

“So, Watson, how are you adjusting to the A&E?”

John can’t make out who's asking. The noise level increases as a group of intoxicated students pass by their table at the pub and make most attempts at conversation impossible for a minute. John is sitting at the end side of the long table they’ve put together from three smaller ones in order to make room for all the twelve participants of the after work gathering. He is searching the faces of those sitting closest to him, trying to see from whom the question had originated and finally lock eyes with Eva, who is the most experienced of the nurses with her 20 years on the job. She smiles at him and looks like she expects some sort of answer. He holds up his hand in a gesture that hopefully communicates that he’ll answer as soon as the loud crowd has passed. When two students bump into his chair and the rest of them have more or less successfully made their way towards the exit, John speaks.

“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps it’s you that ought to be the judge of that?” he says with a smile, taking one more drink of his beer.

Apparently that's the right answer, because Eva smiles as she plays with her almost empty beer glass.

“We have no complaints, Doctor Watson. It was a long time since we had someone who was so calm in the face of badly injured knees,” she says, hinting at an event a few nights earlier, when a woman had managed to cut herself with an axe in the knee. It’d been unusually messy, even for the A&E, and one of the younger doctors in training had actually ran out in order to avoid to throw up.

“Well, what can I say? You get used to see all kinds of things when you work as a locum.”

Eva and a few others laugh, and Selma, who's sitting to his right, raises her glass for a toast with him.

“To gruesome locum work,” she says smiling, her tongue barely visible as she sticks in his direction.

The group is soon involved in other subjects which John has a hard time following, as they are discussing former colleagues, recurrent patients and inside jokes. Besides him, Selma joins in with a few words every now and then, but he can feel her restlessness even when he doesn’t look at her.

“Yeah, John, you do the stitching like few others. Never seen anyone stitch up wounds in that pace before.”

Laura, who's sitting on John’s leftt side, gives him that look of respect that he’s grown used to the last two weeks. She's the youngest of the doctors on staff and has been following John for a few shifts the past weeks. Her habit of telling him exactly how impressed she is by his precision and speed after each patient he’s treated showed no signs of declining after the first shift and her praises often leave John both delighted and a bit unsure as to how he should answer. John finds himself wondering if that's how Sherlock feels every time John can’t contain his ‘amazing’ after Sherlock's deductions.

“I know!” Selma exclaims, now leaning in to join the conversation that has finally settled around something she has an interest in; their work. “I really want to learn how to do that, and not the usual way, no; John’s military way is the way. That’s how I wanna stitch. The A&E has more than enough for all of us to stitch, don't you think?”

Selma radiates impatient excitement at the thought, and John finds himself smiling, because he’s noticed how Selma’s eyes follow his every move, asking him questions about how he decides on which brand of suture to use and how tight the stitches should be to leave the least scarring. She’s never told him about wanting to learn how to do it herself before, but then Selma mostly wants to learn everything, so it comes as no surprise.

“Well, perhaps you should focus behaving like a professional nurse before you start attempting doctor’s work, Selma.”

The words come from another nurse, Jeanette, and John feels himself almost wince at the words. In the corner of his eye, he sees Selma’s face flush as she averts her eyes to the table, attempting to laugh.

John is formulating a sharp reply, but manages to fight the impulse back. Defending Selma would only wreck her attempt at pretending that it wasn’t importent. He knows that from a childhood growing up with a sister who crossed all lines of appropriate behaviour, and he knows that from one and a half year of seeing people react to Sherlock. All his life, he’s never been the person that people raised their eyebrows at, but he’d always been the one standing by that person's side. There had been times that he wished that he could sometimes be the one who let his own impulses out without filtering, but a lifetime of inhibiting impulses led to patterns that were hard to break. It's only on cases, when in fights or during chases, that he lets the impulses lead. That often leads to more violence than could be considered necessary and John is wary of the forces that could be unleashed if he let his inhibitions fall further.

“Well, yeah…” Selma says with a forced half smile, then hesitantly turns to the people on her other side, trying to look like she finds the conversation interesting. It doesn't look natural, and the tension in her body gives her away.

He had heard those kind of comments before, but usually not so blunt and in front of Selma herself. And yes; Selma was out of the ‘normal’ bounds at times, especially when she was tired or things were slow at the A&E. It was often at those times she blurted out something too personal, too blunt or simply inappropriate or thoughtless. John found that he didn’t mind, she seldom did it when she was engaged in her work, and John’s frame of ‘appropriate behaviour’ was probably adjusted to Sherlock standards which had left him rather insensitive to others lack of impulse control. John looked around the table with a quick glance and could estimate that at least five or six people had heard Jeanette’s remark.

Well, he’ll just have to show her that he doesn’t doubt her ability to be professional. It's what he does; he stands silent and watches the whirlwinds around him receive some harsh blows from the people around them, never agreeing and always silently offering his ‘amazing’ or ‘that’s great’ to them a few moments later, pretending nothing's happened, all in order to save their pride just a bit.

 

 

“Are you looking for someone?” John hears Matthew - the perfectionistic ortoped - say.

It's a few beers later and John has just listened to several rather gruesome tales from a nurse who’d recently worked at a gastric ward. Selma had joined in with her usual remarks and jokes, making the stories even worse and the group at the table had been laughing at the mere inappropriateness of it all. John's glad to see that she’d not closed down as he’d seen her do on one another occasion like this, and he's now even found himself edging her on in her comments, much to her obvious delight.

John turns his head to look who Matthew's talking to, and feels himself almost choking on his beer.

 _Sherlock_. Standing at the end of the table in the middle of the crowded pub is Sherlock, looking determined as John’s eyes meet his. John has to take a second to adjust to the image of his very own… friend? Flatmate? _Lover?_ Oh fuck, _don’t even think about…._

“John, case,” Sherlock says, barely loud enough for John to be able to hear it.

“Now?” John says, still confused over seeing Sherlock there, amongst his co-workers in a stale and noisy pub. Sherlock's never come to the clinic when John had worked there, he’d always simply sent a text demanding John’s presence at whatever crime scene he was currently heading to. John reaches for his phone and checks the screen for missed texts, but there are none. He looks back at Sherlock.

“It was on the way,” Sherlock says nonchalantly, as if stopping by pubs to collect his flatmate is something he does on a somewhat regular basis.

“Hey, you’re a friend of Doctor Watson?”

The voice of… - Philip? - _Phil_ echoes over half the table, as the heavy, bearded nurse raises his beer to a symbolic toast towards the posh stranger at the other end of the table.

“John,” Sherlock says, ignoring both questions. “You’re needed.”

“Hey, you can’t drag Watson away now, he’s just getting started on his beer,” Phil says. “Have a beer yourself!”

Sherlock only gives the loud, jovial man a raised eyebrow before making his way to John. John feels himself tense up as Sherlock approaches. Sherlock wouldn’t… _no_. He wouldn’t make any kind of… No, he wouldn’t. John wills himself to relax. Of course Sherlock wouldn’t display any kind of… togetherness. Still, John feels his pulse speed up with an irrational fear that something will give them away, will give him away. It feels like the way they talk to each other or the way Sherlock acts like John is some kind of possession that he can pick up and place wherever he wants, when ever he wants to, will somehow give away the fact that John Watson is not a typical bloke who happens to be living with a madman, but a bloke who engages in an unhealthy, casual and very sexual relationship with said madman. It shouldn’t make him ashamed, but it still does.

“Is Lestrade waiting for us?” John asks as Sherlock comes close enough to hear him without risking that the others at the table will overhear.

“No crime scene,” Sherlock says, holding his own phone up in an impatient gesture.

“So where are we…?”

“The morgue, there’s a corpse that might be interesting to a cold case that I looked into a few months ago.”

“Well, then there’s no hurry, is there?” John says, feeling the effect of his two beers; making him slow and rather unwilling to run off from the warm pub and into the clinically lit morgue to look at a corpse.

“I need your expertise to be able to determine whether the wound on his left leg was treated under less than ideal circumstances, implying that he might have been treated in a country with less developed health care or a military hospital,” Sherlock announces and looks as if he expects John to just grab his jacket and follow him out that very instant.

“John!” Phil calls from his side of the table. “Don’t leave early on your very first after work!”

Matthew, Eva and a few of the others around the table voice their agreement, and Sherlock looks summonly at John.

“Right, let me just finish my beer, okay?” John says to Sherlock, raising his glass.

Sherlock makes a sound of impatience, but two minutes later, he's reluctantly seated in a chair someone has taken from the table beside them and squeezed in beside John’s. He looks out of place with his suit and styled hair in the group of healthcare professionals who’s just finished their shift and downed one or two beers in a stale pub.

“So, how do you know our doctor?” Eva asks, leaning over the table to make herself heard.

It's a polite, common question. It still causes John freeze up for a second, not knowing what kind of answer he can expect from Sherlock, or if Sherlock will even bother to acknowledge the question. Usually, John wouldn’t care much, but this is his job, his colleagues and his world away from Sherlock and the madness of their life. This is his, and Sherlock could probably ruin what John's built up for himself with just a few words, as is his talent.

“We work together,” Sherlock simply says, his posture still stiff where he's sitting at the edge of his chair and making an effort not to let his legs touch either John’s or those of the woman on his other side.

“Oh, you’re in medicine as well?”

“No, that’s John’s area of expertise,” Sherlock concludes, reaching for his phone again and beginning to fidget with it. John has known Sherlock long enough to read the discomfort in his every movement, but he wonders if the others can see the tension.

“What’s your area of expertise, then?” Matthew asks, dragging his chair closer to the others around John before reaching out his hand towards John’s company. “I’m Matthew, by the way.”

“Sherlock,” John’s uninvited company says shaking Matthew’s hand. John briefly considers offering to buy Sherlock a drink just to get himself away for a moment. When Sherlock is uncomfortable, distressing things tended to happen. “I’m a consulting detective, and I’m here to take John to the morgue to look at a body. John, could you finish that drink any time today?”

This time, John doesn’t almost choke on his drink; he had been prepared for this. Still, he feels his pulse pick up as he hears Sherlock’s words and sees the glimpse of disinterest in his friend’s eyes, which is often a sign that things are going to get worse if John doesn’t excuse them both and leave.

“You’re going to the morgue? Without me?”

To John’s surprise, Selma is the first one to speak, and she does so nearly before Sherlock's finished talking.

“Well, I had no idea that I was going to the morgue a few minutes ago…” John begins, wondering how the issue in this conversation suddenly isn’t that Sherlock has said that they were going to the morgue, but the fact that Selma hadn't been invited to join them to look at corpses. Sure, he knows that she has several different areas of interest, but pathology is a new one.

“If John continues to drink this slow, I’ll be going without him as well,” Sherlock announces, and at that Selma actually smiles at him, which in turn seems to make Sherlock slightly unsettled.

“What’s a ‘consultant detective’?” Eva asks, leaning over the table again, displaying a bit more of her chest than John's currently comfortable with. How can someone look so different in their everyday clothes than the do in scrubs? It makes no sense. Still, this is another version of Eva. A version that's currently focusing her eyes very pointedly at both John and Sherlock.

“I do what the police can’t. I actually solve the crimes.”

“And what do you do, John?” Matthew asks, clearly intrigued.

“I… assist. With the medical issues. And with some practical issues.” John is so used to only introducing his role in their work when they are on a crime scene or meeting a suspect, and doing it in this setting, with colleagues that he has yet to inform about his other occupation, is proving to be more difficult than he’d imagined it to be.

“John's my colleague,” Sherlock says before Eva has a chance to utter another question.

“So you work two jobs, then? Is that why you look so worn out in the end of your shifts?” Matthew says with a smile.

“I do not…” John begins protesting, but is interrupted.

“That’s so exciting, John!” Eva says, rising to her feet with the empty glass in her hand. “I need one more of these, can I get you anything, Sherlock?”

Sherlock - radiating annoyance at the whole situation - shakes his head in an almost invisible gesture. Eva looks like she's going to attempt at persuade him, but John aborts that attempt.

“That’s not necessary, I’ll just finish this one, and then we’ll be on our way.” John raises his glass and takes a few deep drinks of the beer.

“So how does this work, are you his boss or are you partners?” Matthew asks, and John feels how all the blood vessels in his face dilates, probably leaving him with a very prominent blush at the word ‘partners’. Is Matthew implying…

“I assist him,” John offers quickly, before Sherlock has a chance to open his mouth.

Sherlock seems content with that, and looks slightly more relaxed as the conversation begins to center around the work.

“How did you get into that?” Selma asks, leaning a bit over the table in order to catch John’s attention as she speaks, as John had been turned towards Sherlock and Matthew.

“Sherlock asked me to come assist him on a case when… he found out that I was a doctor.”

Avoiding the words ‘when I had just moved in with him’, John tries to find a phrasing that isn’t too close to the truth.

“Oh, so you are friends?” Eva asks.

“We’re colleagues,” Sherlock repeats, and John frowns. Why did Sherlock…? It's almost a mirror opposite of what had been said at Sebastian Wilkes’ office during one of their first cases. John attempts to establish what this could mean, but something about his friend’s face makes his thoughts halt.

It's something close to ‘restraint’. Why?

“Well, that concludes it,” Selma announces. “John Watson, you no longer have any right to claim not to be addicted to adrenaline.”

A few people laugh and nod in agreement, and John feels some of the tension leave him.

“You never told us!” Eva says, looking intrigued at the thought of crime solving.

“Well, the subject never came up,” John simply says.

“Oh, you secretive man,” Matthew says with a laugh. “Any other exciting secrets we ought to know about?”

“Tell them about how you sneaked away from patrol that time in Afghanistan,” Selma prompts, and John instantly regrets telling her that story.

“John, we have work to do,” Sherlock says, straightening up in his chair.

“Right, right, I’m coming,” John says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after one last sip of his beer.

“You can’t leave now, John. You... John’s friend, tell us more about this crime solving army doctor we’ve gotten a hold of!” Phil urges, walking over to them.

Sherlock draws in a breath, and John finds himself holding his own breath, waiting for whatever's to come.

“John’s an excellent shot and likes boring, safe women, so yes, you do have a chance,” Sherlock is turning to Eva with the last of his statement, and John instantly begins preparing the excuse he will offer her on their next shift.

Eva looks a bit crimson, but to John’s relief, she doesn’t look mortified. John makes a vague ‘I-don’t-know-what-he’s-on-about-he’s-always-like-this-so-don’t-mind-him’ gesture to her, and she actually smiles a bit at that.

“So, can we leave now?” Sherlock snaps, finally losing his patience. John is only surprised that he’s held back the snappishness and the deductions for so long.

Before things has a chance to get even more out of hand, John turns to Selma.

“Are you done? I think we need to get going.”

 

 

“You really like boring women?”

Selma’s voice breaks the silence that lingers in the cab. John feels as if he can actually sense how Selma’s thoughts have spun like electrons around a nucleus ever since they left the pub and he's only surprised that she’s held back her questions for so long.

“Well, basically everyone’s boring according to Sherlock, so I wouldn’t read too much into it,” John says with a shrug, watching for any kind of reaction from Sherlock, but he remains silent in the front seat.

“Oh, well that’s nice,” Selma says with a smile, and John is glad that he’d included her on this trip, even if Sherlock seems offended by the mere idea of it.

“She doesn’t look like fourteen.”

Sherlock’s voice breaks in, and it takes John a second to catch on. No. _Not this…_

“Who?” Selma asks.

“John said that the nurse who’d called him on his adrenaline addiction looked like she was fourteen, which is clearly inaccurate. I’d say your appearance indicates that you’re at least 18 years old, even if your social interactions would indicate a younger age. However, none of those estimations are of any importance, since it’s easy to settle your real age to twenty-five.”

John has unconsciously begun massaging the brink of his nose in pure resignation over the fact that he’s just taken Selma with him to remedy some of the things that’s been said by their colleague, only to have Sherlock start doing the same thing. Obviously.

“You’re wrong.” Selma doesn't sound offended, but her voice is more hesitant than it usually is as she continues. “It’s twenty-seven.”

John tries to hide a faint smile.

“Also, why do you like pointing out things that people don’t want others to hear?”

“I’m merely pointing out the obvious. It’s more effective that way.”

“Eh, no, I don’t think so. This isn’t about being effective, is it?”

“Well, being effective isn’t on the top of your priorities, so I don’t expect you to see my point. Your focus is more on proving something, mostly to yourself, but also to some of the people around you - especially your younger cousin - proving that you are not as impractical, lazy and emotional as you’ve always been told. I’d agree, you aren’t. You are willing to work hard when it suits you, but you lack the internal motivation to do anything that doesn’t offer instant rewards. You consider yourself more or less ‘cured’ from this impairment since you found a job that provides just the right kind of instant gratification and adrenaline that you crave, but it’s not working as well as you like to tell yourself. The more frequent relapses of your bulimic tendencies is a proof of that, as is your nicotine gum and the way you find yourself saying things you regret afterwards more and more frequently.”

Every trace of the faint smile that had just ghosted his face falls away as John feels his heart sink. _Shit_. Fucking, shitty, arrogant tosser of a…

“You’re right. Not about the bulimia part, but otherwise… yes. I should be impressed, I guess, but I know it takes one to know one, so I’ll hold back my praise.”

This is new. Very new. John's never really seen this side of Selma, this neutral analyzing, stripped of any hint of joke, spoken with only a minor tremble in her voice. In the front seat, Sherlock doesn’t seem to react, but then John can only see his left shoulder and left leg from his own position in the backseat.

“Of course it would be the eating disorder you found to be the most objectionable part of the deduction,” Sherlock says, sounding as if he's speaking to himself rather than the two people in the backseat, but John knows better.

“Oh, how clever of you,” Selma says, now with a tone in her voice that makes John worry. “Since we’re on the subject of things that people object to having pointed out, have you mentioned to John that the reason that you were in such a hurry to leave the pub was because you were panicking over the whole thing; the conversations, the noise, all the people that John knows that you don’t, and the fear that you might say something wrong in front of them? You don’t like to come off as insecure, but you are, aren’t you? Don’t worry, we all are.”

John rubs his palms against his forehead in pure indignation. This could be bad. Really bad.

“Please, John is well aware that I dislike the whole setting of such ‘socializations’. Your poor attempt at deduction is not flattering to your intellect, which you like to regard as your best quality. You shouldn’t, by the way. Your intelligence is at most a bit above average, and attempting to make me uncomfortable is not very likely to succeed.”

“That’s a relief, then. I’d hate to make you uncomfortable.”

There's a silence, and John eagerly hopes for it to last the entire way to Barts.

“But since my mediocre intelligence wouldn’t allow me to find anything that’d make you truly uncomfortable, I guess it’s safe for me to continue this game without risking to make you uncomfortable.”

Selma’s voice is now almost cheerful, which John finds more worrying than if she’d attempted a more threatening tune of voice.

“You say those things about people to make yourself feel superior, and to give them a reason to dislike you, because if you give them reason to do so, it doesn’t hurt as bad if they do.”

“Coming from someone who is ashamed over the fact that she sees herself as a more qualified and competent professional than most of the people she works with; that point about ‘feeling superior’ doesn’t say much. And you blame your failure in social situations on some sort of poorly substantiated diagnosis from childhood of attention deficits, which makes you feel as you are rejected for something that’s out of your control rather than for your actual personality, so yes; I guess it takes one to know one. Now; do shut up.”

“Alright. Just one more thing.”

“Not the bulimia again, it’s hardly anyone else’s problem if your teeth will…”

“Not my possible bulimia,” Selma says, actually managing to shut Sherlock up before he's finished, which makes her grow in John’s eyes in a rather disturbing way. “Just wanted to say, in the spirit of ‘effectiveness’, that I think that the two of you should talk about the fact that you said what you said to Eva only because you want John in the very romantical meaning of the word ‘want’. Cute, but pining doesn’t suit you, just as you say that ‘deduction’ doesn’t suit me. Now, where were we? Oh, yes. The ‘shut up’ part, lovely. Yes; now I will shut up, as requested.”

John wonders if the driver of the cab will enjoy telling this story to her colleagues in between her shifts. Seen from her perspective, it must be a hilarious story to tell. From John’s perspective, on the other hand, this is…

...going to be such a mess to clean up. And he knows from experience that if someone is going to clean up a mess, it will inevitably be John himself. The only one in the cab who actually holds his tongue about all the thoughts inside his head like a responsible adult. Therefore, he's sentenced to do just what responsible adults do: taking the consequences of others lack of impulse control.

He will have to begin by making sure not to just lock the two of them in the morgue and simply let them continue their mutual disarming of each other. It's tempting, though, and John figures that he too should be allowed to act on his impulses every now and then.

Well, he will have to act on his impulses on a day when his colleague hasn’t been outed as a bulimic with a superiority complex and his very own self-proclaimed sociopath of a lover hasn’t been called on being insecure and in love with him. And, most of all, he can not leave this as he’s just been confronted, more or less, with the devastating realisation that this is the first time someone has seen that there's something - anything - between him and Sherlock, disregarding all the previous times where people had pointed it out. It hadn’t bothered him at that point, because it hadn’t been true then. Now it is, and the prospect of people even suspecting as much is enough to make John feel his stomach clench.

With a sense of surrealism, he pays the driver as the cab pulls over to Barts and begins walking towards the morgue without waiting for the other two, just to escape the pressing silence for just a few seconds.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Impulsivity according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Impulsivity (or impulsiveness) is a multifactorial construct that involves a tendency to act on a whim, displaying behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection, or consideration of the consequences. Impulsive actions are typically "poorly conceived, prematurely expressed, unduly risky, or inappropriate to the situation that often result in undesirable consequences," which imperil long-term goals and strategies for success. A functional variety of impulsivity has also been suggested, which involves action without much forethought in appropriate situations that can and does result in desirable consequences. "When such actions have positive outcomes, they tend not to be seen as signs of impulsivity, but as indicators of boldness, quickness, spontaneity, courageousness, or unconventionality" Thus, the construct of impulsivity includes at least the two independent components of, first: acting without an appropriate amount of deliberation, which may or may not be functional; and, second: choosing short-term gains over long-term ones.
> 
> Impulsivity is both a facet of personality as well as a major component of various disorders, including ADHD, substance use disorders, bipolar disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Impulsiveness may also be a factor in procrastination. Abnormal patterns of impulsivity have also been noted instances of acquired brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases. Neurobiological findings suggest that there are specific brain regions involved in impulsive behavior, although different brain networks may contribute to different manifestations of impulsivity, and that genetics may play a role.
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Impulse control in this chapter:
> 
> It’s hard to determine which actions are caused by a lack of impulse control and which are just done in deliberate disregard for possible consequences. For me, the ‘regret’ is the decisive factor in this. Therefore it’s hard to tell which of the behaviours in the chapter that’s done out of lack of impulse control, but here’s my thoughts as I wrote it:
> 
> The way John sees it, Selma has a pattern of saying things without thinking of the impact of it, and according to him Selma often regrets these things. If Selma has a pattern of impulsive behaviours that she regrets, it’s common to do as she does; attempting to cover it up by laughing at it when people point it out. Earlier, in Floodgates, John thought that she was ‘overly polite’ and in some cases people who are aware of their tendency to say things that might be hurtful tend to compensate it by being overly kind or polite, perhaps in an attempt to show that they don’t mean ill and that they aren’t doing it deliberately. Also; saying things without thinking about how they can be interpreted is a rather impairing factor socially, as displayed in the chapter. Restlessness and impulsiveness tend to make people regard the person as less competent, less reliable and more childlike, which is a bit destructive for the person’s self-image, when they are sometimes using all their energy to fight impulses and stop to think before acting, but sometimes failing to do so. 
> 
> John regards himself as someone who is in great control of his impulses except when in danger. This is was rather interesting to write, since John is perhaps the most impulsive of him and Sherlock, if ‘regret’ is any guideline to whether a behaviour should be seen as ‘lack of impulse control’ or ‘deliberately ignoring consequences’. Both of them act on impulses that causes cognitive dissonance in regard to their self-image, but other than with display of emotions, Sherlock seldom seem to regret his impulses the way John does. Sherlock is probably so used to watching himself for any tendency towards impulsivity in ‘dangerous areas’ (in his case probably emotions, addictions and vulnerability) that he’s rather in ‘over control’ than in ‘under control’. Many of the behaviours commonly seen as ‘impulsive’ in canon (shooting walls, insulting people, jumping with glee over a murder case) are probably just spontaneous behaviours that he allows himself and regards as safe.
> 
> The ‘deductive game’ played in the cab also mentions several areas where people with problems with impulse control may be affected; eating patterns, addictions, social insecurity, need to prove themselves to others and the need to guard themselves in certain situations out of fear of saying or doing something that will harm their ability to reach a goal (be considered professional, be liked by others, not making someone feel ashamed over you and so on).
> 
> Finally; this is perhaps just as much a chapter on denial and projection as on impulse control issues, if you look at John’s thought on his own impulse control...


	3. Self-destructive behavior

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First; ‘Self-destructive behavior’ is not synonymous with ‘self-harm’, so for those of you who might worry about triggers for self-harm; you needn’t worry. A better summary of the meaning of the title of the chapter is - as always - available in the End Note, but basically one could say that self-destructive behavior is any form of self-sabotaging; a behavior that gets in the way of achieving your long term goals. This could be triggering in other ways, though; mainly homophobia (internalized and external) and internal.
> 
> A big thanks to the people over at the Antidiogenes chat room, to besina, Anarfea, tigerstale and winteronmercury for different reasons. 
> 
> As always; my biggest and warmest thanks to my skilled beta, iriswallpaper, who helped me with the questions of 'insecurities' and who's patient with all my impulsive posting before giving her the chance to beta it first.

Sherlock was eighteen years old when he met Samuel in a chemistry class at the uni and he was thirty-one years old when he met John in a lab at Barts.

Common factors in these meetings included laboratory setting and unexpected reactions to Sherlock’s persona. Differentiating factors included Sherlock’s grade of experience with interpersonal relationships and his level of self-control. Those two last factors _should_ be enough to make sure that the end result won't be the same in both cases. At least that’s what Sherlock thought a week ago. As he walks into a morgue with the man he’s in love with and the young, invasive, bulimic-in-denial woman that said man works with, Sherlock is no longer sure. Perhaps this will be the point where history will prove to repeat itself. He can only hope not to cause too much damage to John in the process, and that he himself won’t end up being… taken care of.

 

 

“Alright, lets get this over with,” John says between clenched teeth as they approach the body in the cold, clinical light in the middle of the room. Molly has laid it out for them, but now she's nowhere to be seen. That's a relief. The last thing they need now is one more person with a habit of blurting out odd, irrelevant things.

Selma keeps herself a few steps behind as Sherlock and John reach for nitrile gloves and Sherlock unzips the bag covering the body. The man inside the back is wax-like and stiff, and Sherlock doesn't feel anything from looking at the corpse, just like he never has. The dead don’t feel, so why should the living feel for the dead? It’s just about preventing more living to become dead at the hands of someone else. John has only reacted to this attitude once during the time they’ve worked together, and for that alone Sherlock had been willing to risk becoming more than colleagues. He had taken the risk of ‘companionship’, thinking that he's more equipped to handle that now than he was eleven years ago.

“What do you want me to look for?” John asks, already inspecting the body, lifting limbs and opening eyelids.

“Anything that could point to this man having received medical care under less than optimal circumstances,” Sherlock directs, checking the man’s feet.

Selma joins them at the table, not touching anything, only watching John as he examins the body, following both his movements and his gaze. With her hands behind her back to keep herself for reaching out, she looks like she's looking out over the edge of a cliff, her face showing both dread and fascination.

Sherlock finds himself doing the same thing; looking, following John’s experienced handling of the corpse, trying to not to give away how that simple thing - watching John doing what he was expertly trained to do - affects him.

 ****

 

It began in similar ways, both with Samuel and with John. The unexpected fascination with Sherlock’s intellect and deductions, the refusal to be put off by his behaviour and then his own confusion over their seemingly naïve trust in some kind of ‘good’ in him turned into something almost comfortable. Samuel dropping his pile of books next to Sherlock in the library, ignoring Sherlock’s initial silence and instead remarking on lectures and exams without expecting any answers. John showing up at 221B after Sherlock’s first deduction of him and the lack of mutual agreement, then accepting Sherlock’s invitation to join him at a crime scene that same night.

 

_Samuel wasn’t a genius, but he was smarter than a majority of the others at the uni, and he thought outside the framework and had a certain ‘street smart’ quality about him. Likewise, John wasn’t a pathologist or in great physical shape - due to his limp and his bad shoulder - but he lacked fear, was extremely competent in his field and didn’t question things needlessly. They were both of practical use as well as acceptable company. As the weeks passed, Sherlock begun not only tolerating when Samuel sat down beside him during some lectures and sometimes in the library, but almost finding it stimulating to discuss things with him. Samuel had a wide range of knowledge, a diplomat’s son who had seen a lot of the world and could change perspectives in the blink of an eye, from the spokesman to the devil’s advocate, from the posh privileged academic to the rebell. Sherlock found these changes most intriguing, and by watching Samuel change in the matter of seconds, he began to imitate the quick changes in persona, finding them most useful when trying to get information from others._

_The weeks passed and turned into months as Sherlock and Samuel fell into some kind of friendship. It might have been the first friendship Sherlock had with someone who was close to his own age since he was ten, and it should have been more confusing and awkward than it was for him, but it wasn’t. Samuel dropped by at Sherlock’s room in the dorm to study, but they ended up talking about other things, then breaking into the lab at night to conduct experiments that weren’t by any means allowed by the university. And somewhere between the night-time experiments and the failed attempts to teach Samuel to play the violin, Sherlock begun noticing when Samuel wasn’t around. It felt a bit like there was a void, and he found his thoughts beginning to picture what Samuel was doing, calculating when they were likely to meet next time. Sherlock’s perception must have changed, because being touched was no longer just tolerable; it was satisfying. A hand on his shoulder when Samuel leaned over to see what he was writing or a leg side by side with his own when they had to crowd together in the booth in the cafeteria as more of Samuel’s friends or acquaintances joined them. It had no right to affect him like it did - there was no reason to it - yet it did._

_By the time that Sherlock caught up with what it actually was that was happening, it was already too late. He had feelings - illogical, irrational and overwhelming feelings - towards his only friend. Sherlock approached this new sensation with the mind of a drunk scientist; attempting neutral data gathering but ending up with strongly biased and highly questionable results. No conclusion could be drawn from such data, so Sherlock was left fumbling in the dark. In the mean time he began noticing the way Samuel looked at him as Sherlock played the violin or gave him the answer to a question he hadn’t even been formed. It wasn’t Sherlock’s area - and he was strongly biased - but there was still… indications, he thought. Indications that Samuel perhaps could harbour some similar… chemical responses._

 

“Look,” Selma says with a trace of hesitation in her voice as she looks at Sherlock over the corpse. “I just want to say that I’m sorry about what I said. Not all of it, no; far from, but the part where I made assumptions about the way you feel about John. It’s none of my business, and I had no right to… voice my thoughts on the subject.” **  
**

Sherlock raises his left eyebrow slightly, but that's the only acknowledgement he gives her.

“I’m sorry.” She says when no one else speaks.

“Don’t apologize to me, I’m sure it was more uncomfortable to John,” Sherlock says absently, inspecting the soles of the victim's feet.

“To John?” Selma asks.

“Yes, he’s a very straight man, and I doubt that he’d appreciate the notion of another man lusting after engaging in very homosexual activities with him,” Sherlock continues, now hunching down to get a better view of the man’s ankles.

“Sherlock....” John says, and Sherlock doesn’t miss the underlying tone of warning in John’s otherwise low voice.

“Don’t be ashamed, John, there’s nothing wrong with being straight. It’s all fine. Fucking another man’s face relentlessly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, is it? I assume it’s not the preferred brew for cardigan-wearing, gentle doctors.”

A muffled sound coming from John’s side seems to surprise both men. Sherlock’s eyes flicker up, noticing Selma barely containing a giggle while trying to make it look like cough.

“That’s quite enough, Sherlock.”

There's no warmth in John’s voice, and this is exactly how Sherlock had felt then, isn’t it? So it makes sense. It makes perfect sense that it’d feel the same way now, eleven years later. Some things don’t change, and some people don’t change. Sherlock hadn't been able to change, even if he ought to.

 

_Samuel was drunk. Sherlock was drunk too, but probably more affected by the cocaine in his blood. Cocaine was a rather recent discovery, dating just a few weeks back. It’d been at one of the parties Samuel had dragged him to he’d first tried it, and once he had, he’d realised that this might be a perfect solution for one of his biggest worries: not being agreeable enough to be around Samuel’s friends. There was only so long someone would stand dragging a bored Sherlock around to say inappropriate things to his friends, even if Sherlock had really, really tried not to be himself. He’d managed to sit through lunches or conversations at parties without giving his true self away too much, but it was a strain and he couldn’t risk to not manage it in the future. Samuel liked him, but he wasn’t like him. Samuel needed his group of friends, he was a friendly person who people liked, and who Sherlock more than liked. And if Sherlock was bored or frustrated for too long, he’d start fidgeting or doing rhythmical patterns with his feet, chewing on his lips or digging his nails into his hands. It was a childish behaviour that one grows out of; only Sherlock never had, he’d only managed to manage it when people saw. He was a loner by nature, so he didn’t need to hide it too often. When in class or the lab it wasn’t an issue; he was preoccupied and stimulated enough so that he didn’t need those little… tells. But having long lunches and hearing people talk, that was another thing, and that was bothersome. There was always a risk that he’d say something that made the others look at him as they fell silent, and that was something he was used to, but Samuel wasn’t, and he shouldn’t have to be. So Sherlock discovered that cocaine was a remedy. It made him calmer, clearer and it made him somewhat agreeable. Samuel had noticed the change, and seemed happy for Sherlock, since he thought it was their friendship that was responsible for the change. And it was, wasn’t it?_

_So Samuel was drunk, and Sherlock was perhaps a bit high and a bit drunk that night. There had been a party and there hadn’t been any taxis willing to take them back to campus, so they’d walked through the streets and towards the university. Samuel had been sluggish and happy, laughing as he tripped and fell over on the empty sidewalk, and Sherlock had been looking up at the night sky and thought of this as something resembling happiness. And he’d held out his hand, helped Samuel to his feet, and Samuel hadn’t let go of his hand. Shoulders bumping into each other, they’d resumed walking and tripping, now hand in hand. And it was something like proof; this wasn’t only in Sherlock’s head. And holding hands was pedestrian and it was quite hateful, but the odd thing was that it didn’t feel either pedestrian or hateful when it actually happened._

_When they’d reached the dorm, and Samuel had finally managed to compose enough coordination to unlock the front door, they stumbled , bumped into things on their way to Samuel’s room. It was dark in the room; Samuel’s roommate wasn’t in, and Sherlock fumbled for the lightswitch on the wall as Samuel tried to rid himself of his shoes, still holding Sherlock’s hand. And somehow that all led to Sherlock almost falling as Samuel lost his balance, and it was the best thing that could possibly have happened, because they ended up tangled and sitting on the floor, hands unclasped but mouths suddenly close._

_Kissing was not something Sherlock had done before, but he was too chemically impaired to even be nervous. It was only natural to seek more heat and more lips, and when the kiss broke Sherlock could feel his pulse all over his own skin. Samuel laughed and crawled to the sofa, and that was it; Samuel fell asleep on the short sofa by the wall after offering Sherlock the bed._

_With a finger on his own lips, Sherlock lay awake, hearing Samuel’s alcohol induced snoring. And he must have fallen asleep, because the next time he opened his eyes, it was day and there was paracetamol and breakfast and Samuel saying that they’d been drunk, so drunk, and that they should just see it as another experiment. Samuel smiled, and it felt quite okay, because they did get drunk pretty often, so there’d be more time for experiments._

_Sherlock was right; there were more experiments. Drunken kisses after a dinner party, then some more after a night out with Samuel’s cousin. Samuel joked about it in the morning with his eyes averted and Sherlock perceived it as a gesture of uncertainty over sexuality. While Sherlock had never been with anyone, he’d early in life come to the conclusion that whatever he was, it wasn’t entirely straight. He seldom felt anything that resembled lust towards anyone, but when he fantasised it was always about men. He didn’t mind, but he guessed that Samuel had some issues with it. Samuel might like to perceive himself as a rebel, but Sherlock wasn’t infatuated enough not to see how this was in constant conflict with his need for approval from his older siblings and his cousins. That was why the first kiss that happened when they were sober was something he regarded as a progress. A progress in what might evolve to… more._

 

“I’m only explaining that we are not and never will be an item. I don’t wish to sabotage for you by letting people assume that you share my inclinations. It could prove to seriously impair your already moderate chances with the women that you need in order to create the uninspired, unstimulating life that you pretend that you want, just because you need to feel ‘normal’, and I’d hate to get in the way of that.”

Sherlock doesn’t even know why he keeps talking. This is more than ‘a bit not good’ and this could actually make things uncomfortable for John in a way Sherlock has no wish to subject him to. But the words seem to form themselves, and it's almost cathartic; this is bound to happen sooner or later anyway. Speeding up the process will only make the strain go away sooner, and then he can do what he knows is ineluctable; take the humiliation and the guilt and deal with them. And he will no longer be in a position where he risks harming John, and that's perhaps the most significant factor. The distress his words might cause John now is less then than the distress staying with Sherlock in some kind of blind, pathetic hope that Sherlock is not who he actually is would inevitably prove to be. And while he hates the possibility that he’d cause John discomfort by these words, there is a certain satisfaction in saying them out loud instead of keeping them locked inside his own head, where they’ve swirled and repeated themselves ever since that first kiss. Now they’re be out of his head, out in the open, and he can move on. John can move on. As long as there's no chance that John will refuse to see him for who he really is, they’ll both be better off.

“Sherlock, can I talk to you alone, I think…”

The strain in John’s voice, the voice he uses when he's so close to the edge of losing control, makes the decision easy.

“You see,” Sherlock interrupts, now looking sharply at Selma. “John suffers from a highly codependent personality and a lack of self confidence resulting from his inability to be useful as an army doctor ever since a bullet destroyed his scapula. He leans on me to give his life enough excitment so that he won't think about dying anymore, and what that says about his choices in life I will leave unsaid. Additionally, he's unable to maintain any romantic relationship for more than a few weeks. He is, however, blessedly free from homosexuality. Given all his other issues, he should count himself lucky not to be gay as well, don't you think?”

For a moment, breathing is the only thing that can be heard, and Sherlock can feel something beginning to stir in his stomach before John finally breaks the silence.

“You know what?” John says with barely held-back fury. “I hate everyone who have ever hurt you, called you a freak or told you that you are anything but human, but sometimes, Sherlock, sometimes you are making it very, very hard not to agree with them.”

It doesn’t feel like a blow to his stomach. Oddly enough, he can’t feel anything at all. His body is suddenly drained of every emotion, every expression, leaving him just as blank as he wishes that he always was. It is nothingness.

From a distance, he can hear Selma’s sharp inhale, her whispered protest: “John…”

Sherlock doesn’t look up from the body. After a second he continues his inspection of it, mechanical movements and automatic deductions.

“I…” John begins, hesitantly. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t… I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did. There’s no reason to deny the truth in what you said.”

Sherlock’s voice is steady, his fingers still efficient, even if his mind doesn’t absorb any of the tells and clues of the body in front of him anymore.

“No, Sherlock,” John says, voice still raspy from the fury just a few seconds before. “No, it isn’t true, but you kept pushing, you kept tearing up… This job, it’s... it’s the only thing in my life that isn’t about you. Everything else is, and you are very well aware of that. And still; still you do this. You destroy everything that isn’t about you. And I won’t let you do that, do you hear me? I want all the parts that are you, but I need this part too. I need something that’s just mine, and you just can’t let me have that. That’s why I… snapped. I didn’t mean it, but right then I felt it. You are not inhuman, but you are behaving like shit, Sherlock.”

John’s voice is restrained anger and remorse in a mix that shouldn’t be possible, but as always, John defies all the patterns of logic that Sherlock knows.

“I said I could be ‘a bit not good’, and you said ‘at least then we’ll know’,” Sherlock informs, voice void of all emotion as he zips the body bag together.

“Is that what you’re… You did this to…” John’s voice raises with increasing frustration.

"No. I didn’t do this for any reason whatsoever. This is who I am.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“I’ll wait outside, the air in here is…” Selma breaks in, waving a hand in front of her face in a way that doesn’t really make the lie more believable. No one comments, and she takes her bag from the floor by the wall and heads for the door.

Neither man speaks until the door closes behind her, and Sherlock straightens his jacket and reaches for his coat that's been draped over a nearby chair.

“You wanted to show me that I don’t want this?” John says, now staring at Sherlock with no small amount of disbelief.

“No.”

“Then what was this about?”

“This isn’t about anything, it’s just you seeing what everyone else sees, but you’ve been too fueled by adrenaline and abandonment issues to acknowledge.”

“Sherlock, don’t even try that. Don’t try to push me again.”

“You’re telling me not to say what we both know because it’ll make you furious?” Sherlock raises his eyebrows, looking down at his shorter friend in a way that can't be described as anything but ‘slightly condescending’.

“Fuck you, Sherlock,” John says with vehemence.

“I don’t think you really want to do _that_ ,” Sherlock says with a provoking half-smile.

John just stares at him, now in total disbelief.

“You are unbelievable. I need to leave, now. I can’t have this conversation right now.”

John doesn’t grant Sherlock a single gaze as he grabs his coat and pushes the door open, exiting the morgue with more force than necessary.

Staring at the door, Sherlock wonders if he's supposed to feel anything. There's a hint of frustration, but otherwise, he's hollow. It could be considered as progress, really, couldn’t it? Ten years ago, this kind of ‘un-reaction’ would have saved him a lot of… discomfort.

Adjusting his coat, Sherlock heads towards the lab to check a few possible leads. There's nothing about this whole situation that is really unexpected, except for how long it has taken them to get there.

 

_The sober kiss happened - just as the first kiss - in Samuel’s dorm room. Samuel’s roommate, Charlie, was out with Samuel’s cousin Lucas, while Sherlock and Samuel were working on a hypothesis for a new experiment. With a pile of textbooks and papers over half the floor, the two of them sat with their backs supported against the side of Samuel’s bed, taking notes and looking through the reference material. It was almost too comfortable being that close to Samuel; Sherlock found it increasingly hard to focus when he could feel Samuel’s leg shifting against his own with every movement of the other boy._

_They could hear the sound of some kind of gathering in the common area further down the corridor and see the pitch dark outside the window. Time drifted by and evening turned into night, which in turn became early morning. Sherlock wasn’t even tired; he seldom felt such mundane needs when Samuel was in the room. Samuel, on the other hand, seemed to lose focus more and more frequently, and after putting down the last textbook on the pile beside him, he leaned his head back against the bed and closed his eyes._

_“I… can’t… read another syllable,” he murmured._

_“It’s no problem, I can take the notes we have so far and continue,” Sherlock said, wondering if it’d be too much to ask if he could stay here studying while Samuel slept. He liked that idea even if he doubted that he’d accomplish anything at all, except counting breaths and memorizing the silhouette of the boy sleeping in the bed a few feet from him._

_“You need to sleep too, sometimes,” Samuel said, a slow smile forming in the corner of his mouth as he opened his eyes and looked at Sherlock, head still tilted back against the bed. It made him look even younger and the curve of his neck, exposed like this, was enough to make Sherlock’s mouth dry. It was illogical and impractical, but the last months had taught Sherlock that logic wasn’t something he could rely on in this._

_“I will, in time,” he managed to reply._

_Samuel’s gaze was fixed on Sherlock’s lips, and as a conditioned response, Sherlock quickly licked his lips. That didn’t make Samuel’s gaze any less intense._

_And perhaps Sherlock was indeed tired, because when he did go without sleep for too long, old behaviors had a tendency to reappear; the small tics, the obsessive-compulsive thoughts and most of all the impulsivity._

_Without really meaning to, Sherlock found himself closing the distance between them. Samuel kept his eyes focused on him the whole time, and he didn’t back away, didn’t even blink. There might have been a dilation of the pupils, but Sherlock was too absorbed by the feeling of his own heart trying to escape his ribcage to make any accurate comparisons._

_The kiss was slow but lacked any trace of hesitance. Lips sliding against each other, heads tilted uncoordinated but eagerly and hands finding shoulders and necks to hold on to. Sherlock didn’t have any cocaine in his bloodstream, but the high was remarkable. The sound Samuel made as Sherlock shifted in order to get closer was something that Sherlock had never imagined hearing, and he tried to make an answering sound, but it came out even more desperate._

_In retrospect, Sherlock couldn’t really tell how they got from sitting beside each other and kissing to Sherlock straddling Samuel, pressing him against the side of the bed as they explored each others mouths thoroughly. They were both hard, and Samuel had begun to rock his hips up to Sherlock’s, and Sherlock had to break the kiss in order to just breathe. After a few breaths, their lips crashed together again, and it was after that things went… bad._

_He felt Samuel’s whole body stiffen, and even if he was not experienced in these kind of activities and their physical responses, he could tell that it wasn’t a good kind of stiff. Then he felt a hand pressed against his chest, suddenly pushing him away._

_“Stop it, I don’t… I told you I don’t…”_

_Samuel’s voice was odd, a mixture of desperation, anger and frustration. Perhaps something else as well. It was enough to make Sherlock grow cold, and he was pushed off Samuel’s lap, supporting himself on his hands on the floor._

_“You can’t just jump me like that, Sherlock, I don’t want this!”_

_Sherlock had a feeling they weren’t alone anymore, and as he turned to look at the door, Samuel got up on his feet and wiped his mouth._

_Standing in the door was Charlie and Samuel’s cousin, Thomas. They both stared at the two men in the dorm room, and Sherlock wished that he could understand what had happened. Was Samuel ashamed? Why did he say that Sherlock had jumped him, and had Samuel really told him that he didn’t want to…_

_“What’s going on here?” Thomas said, voice demanding an answer._

_Sherlock stared at the floor, wishing he had an answer to that question._

_“It’s nothing,” Samuel said, pacing over the papers on the floor. “Just a misunderstanding.”_

_“I want you to get out of here right now, do you hear me?” Thomas said, voice ice cold._

_“It’s okay, he just didn’t realise that I didn’t, that I’m not…”_

_“I know that you’re not, but that freak was all over you, and that is not a misunderstanding.”_

_Sherlock felt the heat of his skin change from aroused heat to the familiar, old heat of humiliation. He stumbled up from the floor, making his way to the door without looking at anyone. He needed air, he couldn’t breath, this was not happening, Samuel wouldn’t…_

_“If you ever, ever assault my cousin again, I will make sure to take some very drastic measurements.”_

Sherlock hadn't been someone who would run away from things. He might not have been exactly confident, but he had a sense of pride, or at least a sense of hiding everything that could be perceived as some kind of weakness. And so he had ran. And while Sherlock wasn’t someone who avoided people just because they disliked him, after that night it had no loger been mere dislike, it'd been disgust, and so he had begun avoiding them. Everyone around him seemed to know that he had imposed himself on Samuel, tried to lure him into his own perversities, and terms like ‘freak’ were no longer whispered, but spoken out loud. And thinking of what happened after that, perhaps they had been right, because Sherlock had only wanted to explain or set things right, but it had ended… worse.

Sherlock wasn’t someone who ignored clear evidence. Therefore, he made the decision not to ever attempt closer acquaintance with anyone again after what happened with Samuel. It was at rehab this decision had formed, after things had gotten… worse. There was no other word for it. ‘Worse’ seemed to be the only accurate term, because he lacked the ability to describe what had actually happened before he ended up in rehab. Once the decision was made, life became easier. He could not change what had happened, but he could do the only logical thing; make sure that he would never be close enough to someone to become that infective or that out of control again. It was the only logical solution.

 

Sherlock is someone who makes a decision and sticks to it. And it's worked perfectly. Until it hadn’t, and he ended up doing the exact same thing all over again.

At least this time, he’d stopped before it had a chance to get… _worse_. **  
**

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-destructive behaviour according to Wikipedia:
> 
> In human context, self-destructive behavior is a widely used phrase that conceptualizes certain kinds of destructive acts as belonging to the self. It also has the property that it characterizes certain kinds of self-inflicted acts as destructive. The term comes from objective psychology, wherein all apparent self-inflicted harm or abuse toward oneself is treated as a collection of actions, and therefore as a pattern of behavior.
> 
> Self-destructive behavior may be used as a coping mechanism, when things get to be 'too much'. For example, faced with a pressing scholastic assessment, someone may choose to sabotage their work rather than cope with the stress. This would make submission of (or passing) the assessment impossible, but remove the worry associated with it.
> 
> Self-destructive behavior may also manifest itself in an active attempt to drive away other people. For example, they may fear that they will "mess up" a relationship. Rather than deal with this fear, socially self-destructive individuals engage in annoying or alienating behavior, so that others will reject them first. More obvious forms of self-destruction are eating disorders, alcohol abuse, drug addictions, sex addiction, self-injury, and suicide attempts.
> 
> An important aspect of self-destructive behavior is the inability to handle the stress stemming from an individual's lack of self-confidence - for example in a relationship, whether the other person is truly faithful ("how can they love someone like me?"); at work or school, whether the realization of assignments and deadlines is possible ("there is no way I can complete all my work on time"). Self-destructive people usually lack healthier coping mechanisms, like asserting personal boundaries. As a result, they tend to feel that showing they are incompetent is the only way to untangle themselves from demands. Successful individuals may self-destructively sabotage their own achievements; this may stem from a feeling of anxiety, unworthiness, or from an impulsive desire to repeat the "climb to the top."
> 
> Self-destructive behavior is often considered to be synonymous with self-harm, but this is not accurate. Self-harm is an extreme form of self-destructive behavior, but it may appear in many other guises. Self-destructive behavior is often a form of self-punishment in response to a personal failure, which may be real or perceived. It may or may not be connected with feelings of self-hatred.
> 
> It is a common misconception that self-destructive behavior is inherently attention seeking, or at least that attention is a primary motive. While this is undoubtedly true in some cases, normally the motivation runs much deeper than that.
> 
> As might be expected, it is more common in those afflicted with clinical depression.
> 
> Alternatively, in some cases it could be explained by a person having learned dysfunctional patterns earlier in life. Separation from parents and attachment disorders have been linked with self-destructive behavior, and with failure to engage in self-care behavior.
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Self-destructive behaviour in this chapter:
> 
> This chapter was interesting to write for many reasons, but one of them was that the theme summarizes a big part of Sherlock’s actions from the very beginning of this story. He “knows” that this will end badly, so he shouldn’t… He “knows” that John doesn’t really want him, so it’s pointless… And what happens in this chapter, for me, is that Sherlock sees John with other people - people that doesn’t know “them”, only John - and he tries to make sure that John doesn’t panic over him behaving badly or thinking that John might be homosexual, but he panics a bit himself, and end up saying some of the things he had very much planned not to say. And when the panic hits, he sees the similarities with how things went with Samuel, and at that point, he “knows” it’s no point, so he might as well end it right here and right now. The complicating issue is John himself, who Sherlock knows to be both codependent and have a hard time accepting abandonment. John would forgive very much, but John is also proud, and scared over what people think in some regards. Therefore, the only solution is to humiliate him in front of someone, so John won’t be able to do anything but hate him. Hate would make it easier, wouldn’t it?
> 
> There’s so much self-destructive behavior in this fic that I could probably write an essay; but I’ll settle for this for now.
> 
> And yes; there’s more to the story on Samuel. It will come. In time. Or soon.


	4. Borderline PD Critera, part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back to diagnostic criteria. For those who haven't read A Study in Floodgates, the titles including "criteria" means that I am not in any way trying to make an illustration of the entire psychiatric diagnosis, but merely of one or two of the diagnostic criterian, which in itself isn't any ground for a diagnosis. Everyone - diagnosed or not - will meet several different diagnostic criterian for one or more diagnoses, but that is not the same thing as having a diagnosis. The same thing applies here; this chapter is not suggesting that the character in question has Borderline; it's only illustrating how one or more symptoms could appear in someone.
> 
> Now betad by the lovely iriswallpaper!
> 
> All my gratitude for those comments and discussions you've left here for me; it means a lot.
> 
> This has been two rather retrospective chapters; the following ones will focus more on the effect this has in the present, because that's the most relevant part of retelling things from the past, isn't it?

The worst thing about it all is that it's true.

As John hears the door slam shut behind him, the far too familiar feeling of unease has already settled deep in his gut. Sherlock is a nasty, arrogant piece of shit, that much is clear. What is not clear, however, is why anybody with any kind of self-respect would put up with it. Sherlock might be a piece of shit, but John is a pathetic, insecure idiot, which really isn’t any better. And that thought alone is the single most frustrating thing about this whole miserable evening.

He rests against the wall in the sliding doors between the morgue and the corridor outside, breathing heavily, his hands clenched into fists. The impulse to smash his fist into the white wall behind him is almost maddening. He won’t, however, because that's not who he is. Not anymore. Instead, he tries desperately to hate Sherlock a bit more.

Hating Sherlock is too closely related to how he feels about himself, he realises after a few minutes. The urge to smash that white, scuffed hospital wall is now borderline uncontrolable. To force himself out of it, he heads out to the corridor, realising too late that Selma might still be out there.

Selma is sitting on the floor, resting against the wall, completely focused on whatever it is that she's doing on her phone. It takes a few seconds before she averts her eyes from the screen and looks up at John. He feels his mood drop even further; he does not want to talk to anyone right now, least of all the person who’s just witnessed most of the humiliating exchange in the morgue. Fortunately, Selma doesn’t speak, just regards him thoughtfully, making no attempt to get up or gather her stuff.

“I’m sorry about that…” John manages, voice strained.

“Shit happens.”

Selma shrugs, finally putting her phone down in her lap before she speaks again.

“Want a drink?”

The thought isn’t in the least tempting, but compared to the thought of being alone with his thoughts, it suddenly doesn’t seem lilke such a bad option. He instinctively wants to be alone, but he knows himself well enough to know that it isn’t a good idea in situations like this. He needs the distraction from himself, otherwise he'll end up starting a fight in some alley or run-down bar just to get it out of his system. With Selma, he’d have to hold himself together.

“That’d be good, yeah.”

Selma gets to her feet, putting away her phone in the woven shoulderbag and adjusts her clothes. While John focuses on an attempt of compartmentalising the turmult brought up during the past hour, Selma follows him through the corridor that vibrates of fluorescent light and generic cleaning products. When they reach the end of the corridor, she presses the call button for the elevator, then turns to him.

“Some other place than the after work, right?”

He nods, and they step into the elevator, no further communication needed.

  
  


John had insisted at buying Selma something to drink, which she’d only accepted after he’d mentioned the appalling payroll situation for nurses in London. She’d settled for a White Russian - as low in alcohol as possible - while he’d gone straight for a strong lager.

“Should I keep my mouth shut about it, or should I ask?” Selma inquires after he’s set down their glasses on the small table in the half-empty pub they’d found down the street.

After taking off his jacket, John slumps down, takes a large draught from the glass and tries not to look too uncomfortable.

“I don’t think it’ll help,” he says, grinding the heels of his palms into his eye sockets for a few seconds.

“That bad?”

“I should be used to it by now. Clearly, I’m not. Let’s talk about something else. But first; I’m sorry over… well, all of it. I shouldn’t have dragged you along, I didn’t realise that he was in such a nasty mood, or I’d never have asked.”

“Eh, he was right about most things. About me, I mean. What he said about you, well; that’s between the two of you. If you don’t want to talk about it, let’s talk about something else.”

There's a slight tension around her mouth as she mentions Sherlock’s words about her, but her otherwise relaxed attitude regarding the evening seems sincere, and John's impressed by her ability to shake things off. He wished he could have some of that ability as well.

After a few minutes Selma's engaged in a conversation - or rather a monologue - on the impact of music on the brain, a subject that makes her shine like a lightbulb whenever she brings it up. It's fascinating, but John isn’t paying it much attention, something Selma must notice but doesn’t mention, and John was thankful for the sound of her voice. It served as some sort of distraction and kept him - at least in part - from drifting off too far in his thoughts. It was important to keep some thoughts at a distance. They brought up too much… nothingness. And that was his one fear; the nothingness. A vacuum shouldn’t be able to produce feelings; feelings came from something, not from nothing. Still, John found the vacuum that sometimes settled inside of him to be one of the most insistent producers of corrosive feelings.

 

There’d been a vacuum - an empty place where something vital or necessary should have been - in John for as long as he could remember. It didn’t always surface; he soon became skilled at covering it up with other people and their needs and their reactions, but it never left. When not covered up it began to expand and diffuse into everything around him, and if he didn’t delimit it soon enough it’d lead to… things not good.

_The battlefields of Afghanistan - both the actual battlefield and the metaphorical battlefield of a field hospital - had been precisely what he hoped to pursue. Between exhausted sleep and the endless time on battlefields there was no time or place to dwell. And what could he dwell on, after all? He was there, serving both his country, the justice (or so he’d thought) and the others who served. It was a model occupation for John Watson; in the rare hours when he was off duty he found himself too giddy about being alive to even consider the possibility of nothingness. He was there, he worked hard, he was needed and he did what was expected of him and more. He did so until one night when he’d attempted to do even more than he had done before, and that had been the night where he’d almost bled out in the sand. That night had almost ended his physical life, and for a very long time following that he had been convinced that it had in fact ended every part of him except a now damaged and useless body. A life that consisted only of vacuum was no life, but it was the only thing left after that bullet had scattered his scapula and thereby his possibility to be of use in the battlefield. And perhaps he hadn’t only been fighting death and the human enemy; perhaps he’d also been fighting against the vacuum. Either way, he couldn’t fight anymore. It meant he was to surrender, and he could choose between ending it all himself or letting the vacuum corrode him cell by cell until he was dissolved._

In the end, he’d decided to end it himself.

_A few months after he’d returned to British soil he’d made all the necessary preparations. A faint trace of ambiguity had been the only thing keeping him from finishing his set out task, and he’d spent several days in a sort of limbo where he was a dead man walking, but not yet dead. It was on the sixth of those limbo days that he’d treated himself to a boughten coffee on his way from therapy (where he hadn’t even bothered to mention his decision; the only reason he went there at all was because he couldn’t make up his mind as to what to say when he cancelled his appointment - Ella was rather insistent that he’d held his set times) and had seen Stamford. He’d hoped that Stamford wouldn’t recognize him, but he should have known that that was too much to hope for. He’d managed some sort of smile - which couldn’t have fooled someone with even half of Stamford’s IQ - and resigned to having a chat. After that, he’d finish it all. Seeing people he’d known before was one of the things that made the vacuum ever more fretting; it only came to show how he was no longer even able to feel anything for anyone. One more thing lost, one more possible distraction eliminated by that bullet. And soon another bullet would do what the first bullet hadn’t had the decency to do; finally end it._

_But then there was Sherlock. And that rude, nebulous creature with the most seeing eyes John had ever met just paused everything as he began to speak John’s life story only a few minutes after they’d met. John was too shocked to feel how the void inside ceased to expand for a few moments. He found himself intrigued and alarmed by the man that just stated the address to a flat in central London and winked before he rushed off to do something that surely couldn’t be either legal or decent, judging by the sound of it. John found himself to be slightly curious, and that was the very first time since… long ago. He decided to show up at the address given, if only to satisfy that one, last curiosity. He soon realised that it was not that easy to satisfy curiosity when being side by side with the man who took him to crime scenes and made surprisingly good tea when he wasn’t doing something revolting on their kitchen table. And he found that without even trying to, Sherlock had managed to make him feel needed again, like John wasn’t just a scrap of something that once had been useful. He didn’t disregard John’s injuries - he seemed to find them intriguing, rather - but he didn’t pity John or view him as damaged goods. He was probably too unconcerned with the emotional side of such injuries to even come up with the idea of such behaviors. And somehow, that had worked._ Until now.

 

“Want another one?”

Selma’s voice broke the chain of thoughts that had effectively tuned out her words until now. John looked at the now empty glass he was playing absently with and nodded.

“I’ll go get us some more. Same for you?”

“I think I should take something without alcohol, then,” she said, flipping the melting ice in her otherwise empty glass.

“Not much of a drinker?”

“I’m not so great with inhibitions as it is. I prefer to keep what inhibitions I do have.”

“So; virgin White Russian?” he said, surprised at her answer for several reasons.

“On the other hand, I think tonight has shown that none of us has fully efficient inhibitions, so let’s indulge. I’ll have another regular Russian, if it’s okay?”

John assured her that it was, and left her smiling as he made his way through the pub. When he returned with their second round she looked inquiringly at him, but resumed the previous topic for a while, now with a more actively listening John. They’d made it to their third drink when she once again got that look on her face, and now she spoke.

“Is he always like that? Your colleague?”

She was hesitant, but the alcohol seemed to have made her less self-conscious about saying things that might upset him, because she didn’t look like she expected him to throw a fit over her question on a topic he’d announced that he didn’t wish to talk about.

“Well, yeah, he’s usually a rude git, but this was a bit more arsehole than usual. Not sure what got him in that mood, though.”

“Insecurity?” Selma shrugged, sweeping some of her light brown drink.

“Insecure? Sherlock?” John said with an amused grin, forgetting that he was in fact furious with the man.

“Don’t know, you know him better,” she said with another shrug of her shoulders. “But he seemed rather uncomfortable in the pub, so there’s that.”

“Bet he was uncomfortable; nothing makes him more stressed than the boredom of common, relaxed socialization.”

“Don’t think it was boredom, though. He seemed to watch all of us like he was trying to understand what kind of… I don’t know, like he was trying to read in between the lines, or something.”

“Why would he do that? It’s not like he ever cares about that if it’s not related to a case. In any case, if he tried to fit in he did a pretty lousy job for a genius.”

“You know him better,” she offered again, smiling. “But tell me; if he’s always like that, why do you work with him? Not that you seem to be one to judge people, but that man seems to infuriate you rather effectively.”

“Oh, yes. Like few others.”

John rolled his now empty glass in his hands, distantly wondering if he should even be discussion Sherlock with his co-worker. Still, he didn’t change the subject. Perhaps it was the weakening of inhibitions Selma had mentioned. Selma, who began to look quite attractive - if he were to disregard the fact that she was almost half his age - with her animated movements and with her idle fidgeting lessened by the depressing effect of alcohol. He shook his head. _No._

“I can see that. So why do you put up with it?”

“I don’t always put up with it. But when I do, I guess it’s because he’s usually not that brutal about it, usually he just slips because he’s too absorbed with solving mysteries or doing something else ‘not boring’ in that great brain of his to even notice that people might not like the truth too much.”

“Ah, that sort of fellow. Then I see.”

“See what?” John asked, at a loss over what Selma was referring to.

“Never mind. But tell me, how long has he been in love with you?”

 _Alright._ No more liquor for his inhibitionless colleague. She seemed far too relaxed talking about things she’d been apologizing for bringing up just a few hours ago.

“What makes you think that he is?” John ends up asking, curiosity getting the best of him.

“I got a hunch. It’s just one of those things you notice - or think that you notice - that you can’t really explain, I think. And then there’s the jealousy.” Selma bit her lip and grinned, clearly enjoying this subject way too much.

“He’s not jealous, he’s frustrated over not having everyone’s full attention all of the time,” John protests.

“Nah, don’t think so, that would look totally different. Why do you think I didn’t make a big deal out of what he said about me? And why do you think he said it? And why did he say those things to Eva?”

John’s mind is a bit affected by the alcohol, but he has lived with Sherlock long enough to be able to follow most patterns laid out in front of him no matter what state his brain is in.

“But since he’s making a point about you not being… how did he put it? Oh, something about ‘liking to fuck another guys face’ -  wasn’t it? - I guess he’s miserable.”

Selma, on the other hand, didn’t look miserable. She looked quite intrigued, to be honest. And John couldn’t understand how things had gotten to this point; a point where he was more frustrated over his unhealthy and unadvisable relationship with someone of a gender he wasn’t even attracted to than he was frustrated over the fact that he wasn’t at the after work closing the deal with Eva, who had certainly made it at least moderately clear that advances would be welcome. Shit, he was pissed at the git, and still…

“Hm, yeah, that… Excuse the language, I’ve never heard him even utter words like that before.”

“Please, since when do I care about obscenities?”

True that.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Put him out of his misery in that case.”

“It’s not that simple,” John said, feeling how it was perhaps the understatement of the day.

“How so?”

“Because we live together. He’s my flatmate.”

“Oh. And because of that, things could get… odd?”

Things have always been odd, and could hardly get more odd, but John’s not going to point that out.

“No, because he’s also my best friend, that shitty arsehole.”

“Please remind me not to enter a close friendship with you.”

John just looked up at her, and couldn’t help but to smile. Selma smiled back, still far too animated about this subject.

“If he’s your best friend, colleague and you’re living together, and you said what you said about him, knowing what I think you know about him - no matter how shitty his own remarks were - than I’d say you were pretty cruel earlier. But that’s just me.”

He stared at her for a few seconds, noticing that she had started to feel a bit uncomfortable, but not looking away. Sherlock had begun to look away more and more frequently. _Uncomfortable?_

“Well, I guess, yeah. It was. It’s just that… he keeps doing that. Pushing it.”

“Why?”

Trying to find an answer, John fell silent. He found himself thinking about the vacuum, about how far he had already gone - so many times - in order to escape it. It was fear of something that could - would - destroy him. Not the fear of getting a knife in his throat or a lethal dose injected during a kidnapping. It was fear of something well-known, something almost worse than dying. What would he do to avoid it? What wouldn’t he do to avoid it?

“Excuse me for a second, I think I need to send a text.”

Selma took the pause as an excuse to use the bathroom and John was left with the phone in his hand, staring at the empty screen, trying to figure out if he was on to something or just drunk.

His fear was about something recurrent, something real. He was right to fear it, because there was no doubt that it would end him in a way worse than any knife could. But what if he’d only faced the vacuum once or twice? What if his fear had been based on one experience only, and there was no evidence that things would end up the same again, except for the instinct in his gut? Was it real then? Was it advisable to avoid anything that could possibly lead to that same situation? Or was exposure the only way to reason?

Before Selma had returned from the bathroom, a bit unsteady on her feet, John had tapped out a text, corrected two spelling mistakes and then sent it. Time would tell if he was pathetic or brave.

“One more?” he asked as Selma got seated, and she nodded with a smile, face flushed from the alcohol and amused at something that he couldn’t quite make out.

“Please, I think we need it. Unless you have somewhere you need to be?”

“No, whatever that would be, I think it would be better done without this kind of blood-alcohol level,” he said and waved at a waitress who was passing by a few tables further down the pub.

“Two more, and some nachos.”

John got his phone up again, swiped over the screen to unlock it and then finally shut it off completely before letting it slip back into his pocket.

He was too drunk and too tired to even fear any vacuum tonight.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Borderline Personality Disorder according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Borderline personality disorder (BPD) (called emotionally unstable personality disorder, emotional intensity disorder, or borderline type in the ICD-10) is a cluster-B personality disorder, the essential feature of which is a pattern of marked impulsivity and instability of affects, interpersonal relationships and self image. The pattern is present by early adulthood and occurs across a variety of situations and contexts.
> 
> Other symptoms usually include intense fears of abandonment and intense anger and irritability, the reason for which others have difficulty understanding. People with BPD often engage in idealization and devaluation of others, alternating between high positive regard and great disappointment. Self-harm, suicidal behavior and substance intoxication are common.
> 
> (For more notes on Borderline PD in this 'verse, see chapter 5 of A Study in Floodgates)
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Borderline PD criteria used in this chapter:
> 
> The criteria (from the DSM-IV) for Borderline Personality Disorder used in this chaper was:
> 
> (7) chronic feelings of emptiness
> 
> This is a symptom that can be hard to describe, but I made one interpretation in this chapter, using "the vacuum" as a metaphor. I've met many people who describe something similar; a void, something lacking, not feeling whole by oneself, but needing something external to hold it all together. Some theories, including those of Martha Lineham (the mother of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is commonly used with good results in lessening suffering and sometimes "curing" Borderline PD, eg. making so that not enough symptoms apply to grant a diagnosis) suggests that this could be because the person has been invalidated (not confirmed or accepted) in his or her temperament, behaviors and more, due to instability or turbulence around the individual during some of the most intense years of personality development. This, of course, is theory, and the theories also see tendencies to genetical components in this personality disorder, as well as a very high rate of psychiatric comorbidity. Many professionals would also argue that this isn't a disease; it's a uneven development of personality that causes maladaptive behaviors (that were once very useful, but don't work when one grows up) and suffering for the individual. This also means that the 'treatment' must focus on changing patterns of behavior, cognition (like the chronic self-blame one often sees) and emotional regulation, not on medication.
> 
> In this case - in this verse - that could be because John grew up putting others' needs in front of his own from a very early age, and also due to a very unstable enviroment, as it seems that he never knew what he would come home to or what reply his behaviors would lead to at any given time. It could be argued that he wasn't given the chance to safely discover his own 'self' and become grounded in this 'self', and therefore only sees himself clearly when he's a part of a circumstance, of a pattern, when he's needed or has a role. Others reflections of him might be what he needs to see himself clearly. Just speculations on my part, but I think that's how I've written him from the start. He needs connection, he needs to be useful, because he's always built his self-worth on being those things. Taken away from that - like after the war - there's nothing. He's nothing. He looses the motivation to do things, because there isn't anyone/anything to do them for. Left with too much time and too little purpose; that's perhaps this John's biggest fear.


	5. Depression criteria, part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now betad by the amazing iriswallpaper.
> 
> Trigger warnings for drug use/use of prescription drugs in a way not prescribed; in drug self-medicational purpose. Depressive thoughts.

* * *

 

"Tell me yours, I'll tell you mine."

[...]

_(Increased breathing rate - not due to arousal)_

"I..."

_(Averted eyes, strained voice. New attempt at answering.)_

"Destructive, perverted, obsessive, imposing, stalker."

_(An answer of sort. Then the face of someone who awaits a blow, either physical or... of another kind.)_

"Alright. Me, then."

_(No blow. The other man's eyes are now staring out into... nothing.)_

"Dependent. Empty. Useless. Broken. Inadequate."

_(Silence. Nothing harsh, no piercing remarks, no disgust. Only heavy air and a lack of reply.)_

"So. Let's never..."

_(The faintest contact of skin. Breaths not quite shared.)_

"No. Let's not. Ever. Again."

_(Silence.)_

 

* * *

 

 

**_Earlier_ **

 

Five words.

Sherlock stared at the screen of his phone, unwilling to accept the sentiment implied by the message. The words seemed to transfer themselves right onto his retinas; as he closed his eyes he found that he could still see them.

 

_[you're an arse._

_not leaving.]_

 

It took a few seconds to digest. Around him, the empty lab at Bart’s was suddenly too intrusive with all the fluorescent lights competing with the words on his retinas.

Not over. Not leaving. _(Not yet)._

Putting his phone aside, Sherlock decided that it must be the alcohol. John is probably drinking; he always turns off the autocorrect when he drinks, thinking that it’s the autocorrect's fault when his messages don’t turn out the way he intended. No capital letters; John's drunk. He'll be less sentimental when the alcohol leaves his blood.

And then he’ll leave.

_(Finally?)_

 

 

John’s jacket wasn't on it's usual hook and his shoes weren't placed as neatly on the low shelf as they usually were. His earlier deduction on John’s blood-alcohol level was proven correct, Sherlock noted. The hallway was dim; the 3 am light from the city outside was not quite reaching the stairs to the flat. It’s too quiet and Sherlock could feel the noise of his own thoughts as the stairs cracked and creaked beneath him. He should have stayed longer at Bart’s, doing some additional tests or just poking about some tissue or organ that no one would miss. He isn’t tired enough to sleep at this point and being awake and inside the flat, surrounded by all traces of John, isn’t ideal. Even if he would be able to disregard the disturbingly ambiguous text he still wouldn’t be at ease. It does feels better this way; having finally broken the tension of waiting for the inevitable, but it doesn’t feel restful. Inside him, something’s hollow, and it's not the clear, freeing kind of hollow where the noise of his thoughts is silenced and he can focus. It’s the unusual kind of hollow that feels more like being empty and in need of being filled once again. Filled and sated with something that will make it possible to focus, to go on and not just being… empty. It’s like a surge, and the feeling of it brings up sense memories that should be kept at distance during his down times.

 

_At age 18, Sherlock’s brother hasn’t yet begun stating that ‘caring is not an advantage’. That began later, in a visiting room with styrofoam cups holding too bitter coffee and tables covered with marks. And Sherlock might not have been accustomed to caring, but he can recognize the feeling for what it is. He cares for Samuel, he’s probably even under the influences of the chemical effects such caring and sexual attraction has on the brain; lowered serotonin and increased dopamine, adrenaline and cortisol levels, not to mention testosterone and estrogen._

At age 33 Sherlock knows that caring is not an advantage. If he ever doubted it, he would know from the restless tension in his mind ever since he kissed John. The dread of what consequences that could bring had been present even before that kiss, but after that, it was increased to critical levels. Sherlock isn’t good, and Sherlock cares about what happens to John. The dissonance between what he wants and what he wants to want is creating disturbances in his mind palace and disarray in his thoughts. Another dissonance; John claims to want to be with Sherlock, but Sherlock knows this to be highly unlikely. It’s probably more about John not wanting to be without their life of adrenaline and being needed but it’s really up to John to decide that for himself. The problem is that Sherlock can’t live in the limbo between what’s said and what he knows will follow. It’s better when it’s over. Sherlock doesn’t care about himself, but he cares about avoiding more self-loathing, which he finds to be a problematic issue when he tries to trust his instincts in the Work. Most people already loath him; if he loathes himself as well then why would he even bother to solve crimes and fight to get his deductions and solutions heard?

_Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock will later agree, but when he hasn’t heard from Samuel two days after the disaster where the roommate and the cousin found them, Sherlock still cares about what happens to Samuel. Most of all, he cares to find out what happened, what made Samuel turn from sucking on his bottom lip to saying that he didn’t want that - didn’t want Sherlock. It could have been a show for the cousin; Sherlock knows that homosexuality is frowned upon even if he never understood why it should even be an issue which gender the participants in coitus has, as long as they’re both getting something out of the activity. But if it had only been a show, why didn’t Samuel contact him? Why didn’t he apologized for what he’d said and explained why? There was surely some kind of protocol for situations like these but Sherlock didn’t know any of those protocols, and he was beginning to climb the walls of his stuffy dorm room. He hasn’t left the room other than to use the bathroom since he escaped Samuel’s cousin and even the thought of opening the tiny window is too much._

_After three days of pacing, fidgeting and hitting his head against the floor Sherlock collapses on his crowded bed, knowing his behavior to be irrational, but not finding the energy to be rational._

 

As Sherlock walks through the dark sitting room and into the kitchen, where the lamp with the broken shade paints the room in contrasts between warm yellow and long, dark shadows, he knows that he won’t be able to sleep. There’s a panic in this knowledge and without allowing himself enough time to consider the possible consequences, Sherlock heads to the bathroom and rummages through John’s things. In a metallic box that holds several bottles and packets he finds what he's searching for. He might not have cocaine, but it’s not cocaine he needs at this point anyway. He wants to decrease the surge of not knowing. John had rarely used the small bottle of strong benzodiazepines that he'd been prescribed when his flashbacks had left him shivering or grinding his teeth hard enough to cause damage two years ago. Before Baker Street. _Before Sherlock_. John thought that narcotics for except his physical pain was a sign of him being even more damaged than he already knew himself to be, and had only used the little blue pills twice. Sherlock had used similar pills occasionally to manage coming down from cocaine highs several years ago. Before Baker Street. _Before John._

Without examining this train of thought more closely, he took five pills and swallowed them down by drinking directly from the tap in the bathroom, before putting the bottle back in the metal box. Metal box, wooden box. _Did it matter?_

 

“Good morning.”

Sherlock stops typing mid-word. He hadn’t heard John entering the sitting room, his mind finally focusing on something more important than his own sentiment. The morning light pours in through the tall windows of the sitting room and Sherlock wills himself not to look up at John. He doesn’t sound angry.

“Paracetamol’s in the box by the microwave.”

Sherlock is surprised at the indifferent tone of his own voice. He didn’t think he’d manage it, but apparently his vocal cords are not as affected as his mind. Perhaps the little blue pills aren’t as useless...

“Ta, found them last night, though it took some time,” John says, voice equally neutral. “Figured I’d need them if I was to talk to you.”

Not dignifying that with an answer, Sherlock resumed his typing. He’d been working on a draft for an article on dirt and bacterias found under the nails of humans, which he thought would perhaps be a bit too enlightening for putting on his blog, where people might read it and learn how to hide the traces of themselves left on the bodies on their victims, but on the other hand it was fascinating and would surely pique the interest of his readers. His mind was a bit dulled but he found that it was focused enough to do this comparatively simple writing. Without the distractions of the surge inside and the confusion of his reactions, he’d finally managed to make himself do some work instead of just being a sentimental and frustratingly pathetic individual who stared at the paperbacks John had left by the table in the sitting room. It was a clear improvement, even if he still disliked having to use something that was prescribed for emotional distress in order to enable that improvement. That was in itself frustrating when one claimed not to do emotions.

“Because you know what, Sherlock? If you want to end things, just say so. Don’t try to find some roundabout way of making me do it, just because you think that’s what’s going to happen anyway.”

“It is what’s going to happen, but that’s irrelevant to what you’re implying,” Sherlock lied, voice now sharpened by surprise. He hadn’t thought John would be level-headed enough after the exchange of words last night to even attempt to find a reason behind the words except for the undeniable fact that Sherlock was just as inhuman as John himself had so accurately stated at the time.

“I don’t think it is. And by the way, you’re an arsehole.”

“Yes, you texted me that information last night.”

“I did. And I also included another piece of information for you in that message. In case you’re wondering, that still stands, as does the ‘arsehole’ part. Because you behaved like a piece of shit, and I shouldn’t have said what I said, because I didn’t really mean it, but you really pissed me off, Sherlock. You say that I’m afraid of being alone. Well; you’re not afraid of being left; you’re certain of it. And I guess it has something to do with all that stuff that Mycroft tried to tell me, and that you won’t tell me, but I don’t really give a crap. You can’t just go around treating people like shit because you want to self-sabotage yourself into being right about… whatever it is you think that will happen. I’m not leaving. I am, however, more than a bit pissed off right now, so please don’t attempt another try at the self-sabotaging right now. If you want out, say so. Don’t push me into ending it for you just so you can blame me and rest assured that you were right about it from the start.”

John finally breathes after what might have been the longest cohesive exposition he’d held for months, at least on topics other than public transport or hypochondriac patients. He must have been awake for quite some time putting together arguments and insults in a way Sherlock knows that he usually does before he delivers his stated opinion on matters that might be uncomfortable for everyone involved. Usually these opinions aren’t about Sherlock, because John is rather comfortable with grumbling with him whenever he sees a reason. They usually involve authorities, co workers (other than Sherlock) or that one incompetent bank employee that John finds unbearable enough to report to the manager, after the way he’d treated a woman in the line before John a few months ago. But today, Sherlock’s the topic of John’s exposition, and he doesn’t know if he ought to feel special or degraded by this fact.

“I’m not self-sabotaging. I’m merely being myself. If you find that to be self-destructive than I don’t see why you are still here.”

“You are self-destructive, Sherlock. So am I. Let’s just leave it at that and get to the point. I’m not leaving just because you want to push me and poke me until something finally blows up in your face.”

“You’re right; that, what you just said, could be the very definition of self-destructive behavior.”

“I’m not letting you push and poke me. You’re going to stop doing that, because I don’t think you want to do that any more than I want to you to do it. I don’t want to say this, but it’s true; if you poke me, I will poke you. And you don’t want to get into that kind of game. I know your weaknesses and you know mine. I know that I can be cruel when I’m pushed far enough and I don’t know how you feel about this, but I don’t actually want to do that to you. Perhaps you want to, but I doubt it. I’ve never known you to be cruel for the pleasure of it. Let’s not play some manipulative game of mutual destructiveness. We’ll mess this up a lot anyway, let’s not add intentional cruelness to that mess, alright, Sherlock?”

Unable to answer, Sherlock finds that his vision narrows into one single point on the wall a few feet away. The intricate floral pattern of Mrs. Hudson’s wallpaper blurs in the outlines and the black and the white are no longer contrasting; they’re blending into a hideous mess of grey with spots of white and black.

He couldn’t even do this properly. Couldn’t even give John one easy way out and stick with it.

Sherlock nods, hardly moving, but John must see it, must see what his words have reduced him to, because he stays silent as he leaves the room.

 

The pills must have lost all effect by the time Sherlock decides to knock on John’s door. He considers taking a few more just to make breathing easier but guilt might not be so easy to medicate away. 

It’s two hours after John’s little talk and Sherlock has spent those two hours staring at the screen of his laptop and trying to compose himself, then trying to come up with his next move. He wants to wreck this even more, and he considered if cocaine would perhaps be the last straw that managed to get John to leave (leave now. He will leave eventually anyway, but part of Sherlock wants it to be now.) but finds himself unable to even follow the thought to the end. And in the end he finds himself unable to do much at all, it seems. Because Sherlock doesn’t want this, doesn’t want to feel this, but he does, and John says that he does too, and Sherlock doesn’t actually want to be cruel, as John pointed out, much to Sherlock’s surprise. Being cruel to John Watson is unforgivable, even if restraining himself from doing so is almost impossible.

Perhaps it’s really self-destructiveness, Sherlock gathers. He’s no stranger to the concept and he’s no stranger to the behavior. He isn’t even sentimental enough to deny it. And if cocaine isn’t an option, and he has to live in this limbo some more, perhaps even finding himself wanting it to last, then maybe (a few pills and) a clean conscious (over how he treats John) would go a long way. The only problem would be if he fails in not harming John. This seems likely but other than hurting him in an attempt to avoid to get the chance to hurt him more, Sherlock finds that he hasn’t had any impulses to be Not Good (other than the imposing on John’s sexuality, but John denies that one, so that’s debatable).

Before he has the time to second guess himself again, Sherlock lifts his hand and knocks lightly on John’s door in an unmistakable rhythm. He wonders if John can hear the rhythm in the knocks.

“Yes?”

Sherlock opens the door, stopping in the doorway and watching John. John sits on his bed, his laptop on a pillow on his lap. He looks just as neutral and unreadable as he did two hours earlier and Sherlock finds this stressful. Unpleasant expressions are somehow preferable to unreadable ones. Certainty is always better.

“I do not wish to cause you any further unnecessary uncomfort,” Sherlock manages to say, voice still steady.

John looks at him with a hint of pensiveness, hands still on the keyboard.

“Alright. Good, I think.”

Sherlock nods, and prepares himself to leave, having gotten his message through without any hesitance or emotion in his voice.

“So, does this mean that you’ll not ask me to leave?”

“No.”

Now it’s John who nods, still thoughtful.

“You expect me to somehow make you pay you for what you said?” John asks, and Sherlock flinches slightly, because yes; that’s what would be expected and the discrepancy between the expected and the actual behavior is distressing.

Sherlock doesn’t answer, which in this case is an answer.

“I think I’ve already done that. What I said there at the morgue, it was cruel. We were both… equally bad, but for different reasons. And I get mad, furious, even, but I don’t hold a grudge, Sherlock. Just… let’s not do it again.”

That makes sense in relation to John’s personality, so much so that Sherlock feels appalled at himself not to have thought that through. He nods again, once more attempting to leave the room, but this time he stops himself. It’s against his every impulse, he wants to distance himself from John in order to make up for what he is, but John doesn’t want that, so he ought not to. Instead, he finds some words to say.

“Should I order some lunch?”

"Yeah, I'd like some Indian."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Depression according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Major depressive disorder (MDD) (also known as clinical depression, major depression, unipolar depression, or unipolar disorder; or as recurrent depression in the case of repeated episodes) is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive and persistent low mood that is accompanied by low self-esteem and by a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. The term "depression" is used in a number of different ways. It is often used to mean this syndrome but may refer to other mood disorders or simply to a low mood. Major depressive disorder is a disabling condition that adversely affects a person's family, work or school life, sleeping and eating habits, and general health. In the United States, around 3.4% of people with major depression commit suicide, and up to 60% of people who commit suicide had depression or another mood disorder.
> 
>  
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Depression in this chapter:
> 
> As usual, I'm only illustrating one or two criterian of many, and one or two criterian doesn't make a diagnosis!
> 
> The criterian for depression (from DSM-IV) this chapter aimed to illustrate was:
> 
> ■Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day
> 
> Note that all symptoms that the individual meets must be visible for more than two weeks, most of the days, every day. This chapter merely illustrates a couple of hours, but I chose to illustrate it this way anyway, due to the format of the fic. Also note that while Sherlock's (and in some perspective even John's, even if they're seen through Sherlock's eyes) feelings of worthlessness or guilt might not be so dramatic at all times, it's still a marked difference between how it displays at the time and how they usually feel; everyone has a different baseline for emotions, so just a few hints of guilt might be a symptom for some, while others always feels guilt, in which case only an increase in this feeling would be a symptom.
> 
> Sherlock experience guilt or feelings or worthlessness/serious self-doubt in both the flashbacks from when he was at uni and in the present time. Those feelings could be argued to be "too much" or "inappropriate"; in some cases guilt is appropriate; as when you've hurt someone for real (as in this case, but the way he reasons about himself could be seen as "out of proportion", the way I see it). Sherlock sees himself as "dangerous" to John, has guilt over wanting what he want, guilt over his behavior and guilt over not being able to even push John far away. He feels weak, pathetic and has low thoughts of himself, which can be a consequence of a feeling of worthlessness. He feels worthlessness in many moments in this chapter, both in retrospect and in present. He also describes how John views his anti-anxiety meds, which also would indicate a feeling of self-loathe, at least in the situation. John's thoughts on how things were after Afghanistan in the previous chapter is also in many ways depressive.
> 
> In the flashbacks, Sherlock is first "climbing the walls" of his room, then just laying in bed, staring, unable to do anything. This is just a brief illustration (perhaps it'll return later, more described) of the symptom of motor aggitation or retardation; feeling restless in the body or feeling very slow and unable to do things, which are both a symptom of depression (if enough other criteria are met, as always!)


	6. Self-medication, part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First; thank you iriswallpaper for encouragement and beta on this scirbble of mine!
> 
> Now; Self-medication, part I. Trigger warnings for substance abuse (past time) and possibly (depends on how you read it) uncomfortable sexual content.

_It helps._

_This fact is all that Sherlock needs in order to justify the increased amount of stimulants purchased and consumed during the last two weeks._

_It helps when nothing else seems to._

_His head is spinning relentlessly from all the unanswered telephone calls and questions that still tie him to Samuel. The drugs aren’t strong enough to completely stop the spinning, but they seem to make things simultaneously a bit more distant and a bit more focused and solid. They make him more solid too, because with a sufficient dose in his bloodstream he now manages to walk to class without flinching every time someone glares at him or calls him ‘perverted freak’._

_It helps, so he keeps doing it until it doesn’t help anymore, and even then he keeps doing it, because not taking the drugs is even less helpful._

* * *

 

_All those things people talk about - the mood swings, the intensity of social interaction and the joys of sweating together on a crowded, filthy dance floor - suddenly make sense to him._

_He can forget like this. There's only a vague recollection of someone named Samuel just before  Sherlock stumbles into the table that had been several feet away from him just a second ago. The crash into the furniture smashes every thought on the silence on the other end of a phone and the way Samuel looked just seconds before they kissed._

_His thigh will surely bruise badly from the sharp edge of the laminate table. It doesn't matter; it doesn't hurt right now, and the woman sitting there just laughs while her friend glares angrily at Sherlock. He attempts a bow and an apology as he straightens up the bottle that fell to the floor, but there's an arm around his waist and he's dragged back into the crowd of bodies that are pulsing to the crappy music. Except the music doesn't sound that repulsive anymore. With this blood-alcohol level it sounds like life itself; even the banalities of the lyrics seem like they hold some kind of truth. And if someone is letting his hand stroke his pectorals through the sweaty shirt that clings to Sherlock like a second skin, then it might be just what he needs. He might not feel anything for the boy whose breath is now tickling his neck, but it isn't aversive, and that is more than he'd thought he'd ever be able to endure._

_He's a scientist, and a fucking brilliant one as well, and he knows about building tolerance. Therefore he's now switching between cocaine and alcohol to make sure not to lose any of the effect due to constant use of either substance. At first he'd hated the dulling of his mind that alcohol led to, but as he began drinking in bars instead of in his room he began to see the advantages. Like this. The instantaneous belonging and the ability to tolerate touch, sound and smell. The sweat doesn't make him feel like there's a filthy membrane covering him, slowly suffocating his skin, no; it's just liquid, just like the beer that spilled on his trousers and the saliva in his ear._

_And he can forget like this._

* * *

 

_Sherlock is not addicted. He recently went a whole day without any substance at all in order to prove that to himself. He needs something right now, but as the internal tumult - caused by an interrupted kiss - and words about Sherlock not understanding that Samuel hadn't wanted this, hadn't wanted this at all - fades he will stop. He doesn't appreciate being dependent on chemicals  to make it through the days; it's degrading, really, but this isn't new. He's used cocaine to make himself more agreeable for months now and just needs an increased dosage during this period of time that's proving rather hard to manage. It's not that he's hurt; it's more that he doesn't understand what happened. He wants very much to understand this, and if Samuel would just answer his phone or his emails or his texts (or his door during the nights when Sherlock's drunk or high enough to attempt personal contact) this chaos of thoughts would go away. Sherlock’s a rational individual; he just need answers so that his natural need to understand  complex processes is satisfied, and he'll leave this all behind._

* * *

 

_It's 4 am and Sherlock knocks on the door to Samuel's dorm. The chemicals in his blood is making his ears buzz slightly, but he’s as level-headed as he ever was, and he knows that things will be different this time._

_It's 4.25 am and he's picked up by the ambulance after having taken a beating from another student living in the dorm (and perhaps some of Samuel's other friends, he's not really sure, his head hurts and he can't tell if it's from the mix of cocaine and alcohol or from having been knocked to the ground and having his face hit more than once). He initially objected to the talk about ambulance, but when the guard said that it was either that or the police, Sherlock found that the medics were probably preferable.  And this all is yet another thing that goes to show that while Sherlock is being rational, everyone else chooses not to be, and still it’s he who gets punished for the irrationality. Or perhaps he just don’t understand their form of rationality? Because he can’t see how being ‘intoxicated’ could by any means warrant a call to the police more than beating someone up, but apparently it does, since he’s in an ambulance with his own vomit on his clothes and his own blood running down his mouth, but the ones who did this is still standing outside the dorm, starring as the ambulance leaves the campus._

_It's 7.56 am and he's awakened rather briskly by his older brother, who’s standing at the edge of his hospital bed, offering him none of the gentleness that the pain in his head should warrant. Instead, his brother blatantly informs him that while Sherlock’s been ‘sleeping it off’ (which he, for the record, has not had nearly enough time for), Mycroft’s been busy trying to find a suitable rehab facility for his baby brother. Sherlock would tell him to piss off, but he finds he isn’t quite capable of doing so, physically speaking. Too much effort. And to be honest, he has no memory of how he ended up here (hospital, that much is clear from the furniture) and therefore no idea of whether Mycroft is making up the whole thing about the drug screen results he relentlessly recites in a very loud and intrusive voice. It would be just like Mycroft - just like every other annoying, irrational person, really - to make these things up. As far as Sherlock is concerned, the pain he experiences is his only problem. He finds morphine dulling, but right now it doesn’t seem like a very bad alternative. Somehow he doubts that Mycroft feels the same way._

* * *

 

_Sherlock’s bruises are not all faded, but he’d forgotten about them until he noticed the look in the other man’s eyes just before the t-shirt was thrown on the floor. Sherlock shrugs and says something about ‘having a slight disagreement with a couple of bigots’, which is, in fact, not far from the truth. His companion laughs at this - a knowing laugh - like they share some kind of silent understanding. Perhaps they do. Sherlock will likely never know._

_Mycroft can try all he likes, but not even he can force someone into rehab without substantial proof of a long and damaging history of substance abuse, and no such proof exists. Being admitted for intoxication once is hardly ‘records of a sustained substance abuse’. Sherlock’s been careful with his temporary habits ever since that early morning in the hospital, knowing he’s likely monitored one way or another by Mycroft. But drinking is not illegal, and his consumption is - generally speaking - rather average for a student. And if there were some pills swallowed alongside that whiskey that’s nothing anyone needs to know about._

_The person now standing in front of Sherlock doesn’t know about the pills, which is important, because he seems like the kind of person that might object to the use of illegal substances. The man does not, however, have a problem with leaving the pub with a stranger whilst whispering filthy promises into Sherlock’s ear, proving Sherlock right on his deductions on the nature of the man._

_The filthy promises whispered were not empty promises._

_And after all, isn’t this what sex is all about? Shameless want. This stranger eagerly wants to do certain things to Sherlock and Sherlock in turn does very much want to be wanted. He doesn’t even have to ask for it. It’s given to him, or taken from him, depending on how you choose to see it._

_There’s nothing wrong with wanting what he does. Even if this is what he wants._

_There’s no shame in being called things by someone who wants you and there’s also no shame in feeling the words in your groin. It’s fine being on your knees and trying to take as much as you can - and then some more - while a breathless voice tells you that you’re taking it so good (you beautiful, slutty thing)._

_There’s nothing wrong with him. At least not something that can’t be fixed with a bit of chemical assistance. It’s a simple matter of chemical improvement, that’s all, and then he can have this. Then it’s fine to need this. And to take it._

_(or have it taken.)_

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-medication according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Self-medication is a human behavior in which an individual uses a substance or any exogenous influence to self-administer treatment for non-clinical physical or psychological ailments.
> 
> The most widely self-medicated substances are over-the-counter drugs and dietary supplements. The psychology of self-medicating with psychoactive drugs is typically within the specific context of using recreational drugs, alcohol, comfort food,and other forms of behavior to alleviate symptoms of mental distress, stress and anxiety, including mental illnesses and/or psychological trauma, is particularly unique and can serve as a serious detriment to physical and mental health if motivated by addictive mechanisms.
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Self-medication in this chapter:
> 
> The self-medication in this fic has been hinted at before, both in present and past time (Sherlock's uni days). It's manily been mentioned as a way for Sherlock to 'be less himself' in front of Samuel and Samuel's friends, and to ease his way in social situations. 
> 
> In this chapter, however, the use of substances seems to serve multiple purposes; forgetting painful events (Samuel's rejection), being able to act like you don't care while others are being less than kind to you, handling your own painful emotions (not understanding, missing, feeling self-disgust), handling enviroments you usually couldn't face (social gatherings, the pub, parties) and 'being someone else' or 'being OK'. Sherlock rationalizes this (well, of course he does) as a simple matter of chemical improvement, and as something temporary. It's just until the worst passes. Just until... Yes, until when, really?
> 
> The problem with (or; one of the problems with) self-medication is that there's often a tolerance built and symptoms of withdrawal when one doesn't self-medicate; it leads to addiction. Sherlock rationalizes a lot (being without was perhaps only terrible due to being with his family that day, it's temporary, he can control the dosage, he is aware of the possibility of building tolerance, he knows what he's doing and so on) about it, which is part of the denial of the seriousness in this.
> 
> In life, we all do this on some level. Food, sex, drugs (prescription or other), shopping, games, porn, nicotine... only to mention a few ways. We all do it, but for some, there are worse consequences than for others, some of it might depend on the seriousness of the problem one is trying to self-medicate for. In Sherlock's case, it's most of his being he's trying to medicate away (more or less consciously), and then a traumatic emotional event on top of that. Not 'problems' that are likely to solve themselves and make self-medication superfluous.
> 
> Much more can be said about this, and there will be another chapter (part II) on this subject as well, but that's a few chapters away yet. As always; correct me, discuss things or point out stuff that I've missed as much as you like; I quite adore learning stuff.


	7. Sensation Seeking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will differ slightly from previous ones. Usually the chapter has only one POV, but for this one I’ve chosen to use an alternating POV. This is because I wanted to show the difference in their experiences during this scene, but also because I don’t think that there’s no other issue (well, except for the codependency, in this story) that these two idiots share to such a degree as Sensation Seeking.
> 
> Also; this turned out way longer than it was intended. And consists only of sex.
> 
> *author whistles innocently as she reviews her 18 pages worth of sex scene*
> 
> And the lovely beta was done - per usual - by the amazing iriswallpaper.
> 
> Warning; this chapter has no explicit consent, and even if they're both willing participants, neither of them attempts to get any verbal consent. I've also been told that this reads less than consensual because of the nature of both of their reactions and thoughts. See end notes for my own rationale behind this.

 

 

 

 

_So this is how it feels, then._

Sherlock closes his eyes, trying to keep everything on the inside, not allowing anything to leak out. It’s so fragile now. He can’t afford any displays or ambiguous tells in this very now. The intensity is not about the pain and it’s neither is it about love. Love has nothing to do with it.

_So this is how it feels._

__

* * *

 

It hadn’t even been an interesting case.

Time-consuming and comprehensive, yes, but it hadn’t been even a five on Sherlock’s scale of case novelty. It was uninspired but still fairly hard to solve, and the frustration was clearly showing on his friend’s face when John followed Sherlock’s pacing steps out of NSY. The fitful motions of the man currently waving at a taxi in a less than cohesive manner was something John had come to attribute to disgraceful handling of violins and rather nasty remarks on whatever John did.

Sherlock was compulsive about finishing what he’d begun when it came to cases (not necessarily ‘finishing’ the case in the way Lestrade wanted him to - doing the paperwork - but finding the solution), something that John had begun to view as a problem, as doing uninteresting cases actually seemed to inflict Sherlock physical pain. And while John had found almost every case they had in the beginning to be interesting - which in retrospect probably had more to do with feeling alive again whilst watching Sherlock dap around the crime scene than it had to do with the cases themselves - he too had begun to tire of the cases that didn’t involve any action or fascinating puzzle. It simply didn’t offer the same rush anymore.

There’s the threat of Sherlock’s frustration, that will no doubt be taken out on John, at least in part. There’s also the tedium of the case working its way in under John’s skin. There’s been no physical contact since that forlorn after work and in addition to that there’s been an almost polite and hesitant air in the flat ever since they talked about not messing this up.

There’s a buzzing of nervousness and irritation in every nerve ending in his body.

( _And sometimes John too wants to throw a fit, but he can’t, because he’s spent his whole life avoiding doing just that_.)

*

It’s the not knowing that gets to him.

Beside him in the taxi, John is restless but trying not to let it show. _Anticipation_. For what? There’s just been a case and Sherlock has not done anything really unsettling as far as he’s aware. Sherlock has been acting as normal as possible these last few days and neither of them have initiated anything that could make John… uncomfortable. Sherlock might be observant, but lately he’s begun to suspect that he might be a bit myopic when it comes to John. He’s simply too close to John to be able to read him as clearly as he used to. Therefore Sherlock finds himself without a clear answer as to why John is currently drumming his fingers against the inside of the car door and frowning his brow ever so often.

Sherlock has never been particularly good at existing in the the limbo between question and answer. And almost every sort of social interaction in which you find yourself wanting or hoping for something from another person consists mainly of that limbo. Therefore Sherlock has made a habit out of being self-sufficient and not looking for what he wants in other people. The strain of not knowing is never worth it, he’s found.

The problem is that with John it might actually be worth it. Sherlock has no scale to measure the worth of what John is against what it costs, because he’s only ever measured the cost of such things, never the possible gain. This, in turn, creates yet another unanswered question, making the whole thing even more agonising.

He solved the dreary, uninspired case and at least he got his answers on that. Even if it is an ultimately boring case Sherlock has never been able to bring himself to leave a case until he’s solved it. Even if no one else believes him or if his solution can’t proven he is satisfied with knowing the answer. What happens after that is of less importance.

Solving the case doesn’t even ease the pressure of being in the limbo of not knowing, because he will still be staring at the next puzzle as he gets home. He will never feel certain or understand what goes on inside of his friend’s head. He’s been spending more and more time not knowing these last few weeks, and it’s beginning to tear at him.

And perhaps it isn’t worth it.

*

Coming home, John finds that the evening is turning out to be even worse than he’d predicted. Sherlock is not only moody, frustrated and bored; he’s also attempting to be civil about it. The result is frighteningly out of character and rather disturbing.

After three and a half hours of Sherlock not destroying property or seriously insulting John, but instead seemingly pulling himself apart from the inside from the look of it, John has had enough and goes up to his room. He brings his laptop and Sherlock’s headphones with him as he goes.

After one more hour has passed, John is bored of everything there is to do online. He doesn't have the concentration required to write up the case - which could probably be written in a way that would make it interesting even if it wasn’t interesting by his and Sherlock’s standards - but is not relaxed enough to watch a movie or just browse the internet. He needs to do something. He needs to act. Being scared is always preferable to being in the silence of the nothingness inside his head.

It’s true what Mycroft said to him the first time they met.

John misses the war.

But there are other battlefields than those of foreign countries.

*

There’s a hand on his neck.

Fingers running through the curls at his nape and... nothing more. He can't see the hand or the person who's currently causing a shiver in his body and a feeling in his gut that is not completely comfortable. Still. It makes the almost unbearable noise of unanswered questions quiet down just a bit.

Sherlock doesn't move, doesn't acknowledge the touch with more than the sudden stillness of his body. Because he'd just decided that John wouldn't miss the blue little pills if a few more disappeared for a while. Then he'd find someone to sell him new to replace those he'd taken from John's pill bottle. It's easier not to jump out of your own skin when you know that there's something that can dull the tingling of being in a constant limbo.

But now - tingling of another sort.  

Of course he'd heard John come up from behind. There simply wouldn’t be any point in turning around only to confirm what he already know. So he hadn't. But he hadn't known. Hadn't known that John wasn't just gonna address him with some predictable question about food. Hadn't known that a hand on your neck can be both so uncomfortable and light in touch while simultaneously fixing all his focus into one single point of contact.

He wills himself to relax his shoulders, but they keep tensing up as he tries to let the muscle tension decrease.

Fingers. His scalp feels like it's being pinched by a hundred acupuncture needles as the hair in his nape is lifted when John's fingers card through it.

Skin. While the sensations of needles is intoxicating (and indeed very much like acupuncture) the feeling of John's fingers grazing against the skin of his neck is just as tickling and burning as he knows touch to generally be. Withholding his impulse to flinch will only work for so long. It's a pressure building up and...

 _Oh_.

His scalp stings as his head is slowly pulled back by the hand that’s suddenly not carding - but pulling - his hair. The hand is not loosening its grip even as Sherlock’s head follows it, and the movement makes the back of the wooden desk chair press against his spine in a way that is almost painful.

 _John_.

Sherlock opens his eyes as another hand touches the back of his neck. It begins as a light touch but turns into a steady grip where Sherlock’s nape and tendon is held between a thumb and four dry, calloused fingers that feel so illogically warm against his own skin.

At first Sherlock can only see the grainy ceiling, but then John comes into his field of view. There’s nothing mild about the way John looks at him. Nothing punishing either, no; it’s closer to… determination?

It takes self-control not to avert his gaze when John continues to look at him for several seconds. It takes even more self-control not to make a sound as John moves closer, pushing Sherlock’s chair slightly further away from the desk and inserting himself between Sherlock’s knees and the edge of the desk. His head is still tilted back and John’s hands are still steady as his friend towers up in front of him. There’s a question somewhere in this, but Sherlock is not quite sure what the question might be, so he allows himself to remain still and silent as he focuses on holding John’s gaze.

The eye contact finally breaks as John moves closer, leaning over him, and everything is suddenly proximity blur and breath.

*

It was not part of a plan.

It was simply what happened when touching Sherlock resulted in the reluctant stiffness that John had begun to see a pattern to. Too light, not enough to be fully palpable to Sherlock’s senses. That much had been communicated in previous situations like this. _Now confirmed_. John will give Sherlock something that he will undoubtedly feel.

There isn’t a trace of irritation or even sharpness left as his eyes meet Sherlock’s. Surprise. Hesitance. Perhaps even fear. But no sharpness. No room to misinterpret.

He gives Sherlock a few seconds to object.

A lot could have been said during these seconds.

_Nothing was._

Leaning in, John decides that words probably wouldn’t work for them anyway. So it doesn’t matter that he fills Sherlock’s mouth with his own tongue instead of filling the silence with something more verbal. And the way Sherlock lets him - lets him taste, tongue, lick - is almost like an answer, but to something John hasn’t even asked yet (and probably never will).

Another answer; yes. John finds himself actually wanting this.

Sherlock; tractable and pliant. Bright eyes, pupils wide and breathing too fast as John had closed the distance. Noises barely suppressed as John took his mouth. Head still held tight. More sounds poorly suppressed as John pulled at the curls in his fist. Hands hesitant as they slowly began tracing up John’s back after a minute of kissing.

Sherlock; not attempting to lead in this. Not only accepting, but wanting (needing?) John to do so. The contrast to what they usually are. The contrast to what John usually wants to aspire to. The acquiescence to what John actually wants.

_This._

*

Proximity blur turns into motion blur inside Sherlock’s head.

There are still questions unanswered. _They can wait._

Having John holding him still while towering over him and invading (there’s no other word, it’s a war of sorts) his mouth is unexpected. Sherlock loves unexpected things. And the way John takes control gives Sherlock almost complete discharge from liability.

( _It’s not your fault if you had no say in the proceedings._ )

Wanting John closer, but not wanting to tip the power balance, Sherlock’s hands simply stroke John’s back without any leading pressure. It’s a frail balance. Too little response and John might find him impassive. Too much of his own initiative and John might think he wants this to be some sort of mutual taking and giving. Sherlock wants no such thing. He wants invasion and he doesn’t want to give anything that John isn’t willing to take from him.

John won’t come closer. Sherlock gets John’s breath against his cheekbone instead - just one word spoken against his skin.

“Bed.”

And there’s suddenly air between them, suddenly a loosening of the grip on his nape and his hair and he finds himself lead by a grip on his arm.

This is the part that he fears the most.

The part where there’s distance between them and John is unbuttoning his shirt while Sherlock stands there, almost unmoving, willing himself not to close his eyes. The critical part; visual input without the distraction offered by physical stimulation.

This could have been pleasurable. John’s fingers easing the shirt from his shoulders and then continuing to stroke down his back. John unfastening his trousers, letting him step out of them himself as John tugs his own shirt off, leaving Sherlock to rid himself of the socks. He leaves his pants on; a second skin covering damaged skin. And this isn’t pleasurable. Not when there’s both distance and too much light between them.

It is - however - pleasurable to find your mouth crushed against another mouth. And being pushed and pulled down a bed and then straddled by jeans clad legs gives Sherlock tachycardia. Sherlock can hear his own blood pulse as a hand holds his jaw while John’s tongue continues the previous invasion of his oral cavity.

*

Having a strategic plan is vital to any advance into new territory. John knows this better than most. The problem with new territory is that it's unpredictable and there’s an unspoken agreement about not asking for a map.

He could ask. He’s asked about these things before. Awkwardly and almost incoherent, yes, but he’d asked. At this point he finds himself unwilling to. There are some things that you simply shouldn’t ask about.

So he doesn’t. Instead he does what Sherlock does; he observes the tells and deduces the meaning of it. The result of those deductions implies that this is what Sherlock needs. ( _What both of them need_.)

He’s never done it like this before. He’s never been forceful like this and he’s never before considered treating someone the way he could treat Sherlock. And Sherlock is quite a picture like this; _black curls_ white cotton _mouth open_ eyes hazed and quivering. John wants to fuck that mouth and bruise that skin. Possibly break it. He could use him. Sherlock would let him.

This is a rush of blood through his body, a sensation so strong that the doubts in the back of his head are tuned down to an acceptable level. He likes this. John Watson likes giving Sherlock more than he thought that his friend would ever accept, and he likes watching Sherlock struggle to take what’s given. Squirming as John gives his hair a harsh tug and suppressing his reflex to push John away as the pain in his nipple must surely be more intense than what could be perceived as pleasurable by any means.

Licking into Sherlock’s mouth John finds that pressing his erection against another man’s cock doesn’t feel quite as foreign when you are in control of the proceedings. And when the other man is flushing and eager but you limit his movements with a grip on his jaw it is a sensation quite unlike most things you’ve felt before. No matter how it all ends John will at least know what it feels like.

*

Denim against bare skin and tongue muscle against tongue muscle. The dual sensation of being both relaxed from the pressure of someone else’s body on yours and at the same time being tense from the arousal it causes. It’s opposites and contradictions, just like everything about the two of them seems to be.

There’s fingers kneading his nipple and there’s a sting of pain through his body. Sherlock can’t suppress the sounds this evokes, but they drown in the wet cavity of John’s mouth anyway. John lets go of his nipple and the pressure on his body eases, his mouth is once again empty and his eyes flutter open.

John is kneeling over him, opening up his jeans, pushing both jeans and pants down. To Sherlock it doesn’t seem like there’s even a moment’s hesitation in this. John tugs at him, willing him to move up against the headboard and placing a pillow behind his head. There’s something rare and unmasked about it all; about the feverish look in John’s face and the way Sherlock instantly knows what will happen. There might be a slight problem with the smells, but he can take it like this; his other senses almost overloaded with other sensations.

The smell hits him as soon as John has stripped off the remaining clothes and settles with one knee on either side of Sherlock’s ribs. There’s genital hair and the smell of genitals and it’s hard to suppress the slight nausea this produces, but there’s also a very erect cock and a very determined John looking at him. And John grabs the headboard with one hand and Sherlock’s hair with the other before nudging his cock against Sherlock’s lips. Willing John to just get on with it so the feeling of being used and almost suffocated by blood-filled erectile tissue will enable him not to focus on the smell and the involuntary vision of genital hair between his teeth, Sherlock tries to dive forward, taking John in. He can’t, however. The grip on his hair won’t let him.

Above him, John lets out something that sounds like a hoarse version of chuckle.

*

It’s easier like this, and it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be easier to shag someone simply because you can use them however you like. It shouldn’t be a turn on to grab someone by the hair and hold them still. There are so many things that shouldn’t be, but still are.

The eagerness in Sherlock’s motions is both uncharacteristic in these situations and very interesting. Sherlock losing self-control when faced with John’s cock is nothing but complimentary and reassuring, proving John’s observations about what Sherlock wants ( _needs_ ). It’s dizzying, and while refusing to let Sherlock get what he wants instantly, John is soon pushing himself into that mouth with more force than he’s ever done with anyone before.

_Brilliant. More brilliant than the deductions that usually come from that mouth._

“Sherlock. Look at me.”

He manages the words, but it’s hard to keep his own eyes from shutting when pushing into Sherlock’s mouth. The image is striking, more stunning than the two previous times, because Sherlock is almost naked and John’s got him pinned between the headboard and his own pelvis. He likes Sherlock like this, likes everything about this. There’s no hesitance about his own heterosexuality or their relationship at this moment. It’s just this; fucking into Sherlock’s mouth and seeing Sherlock’s eyes tear up from the effort of suppressing his gag reflex.

Sherlock’s eyes meet his. And they’re more unreadable than they’ve ever been, so John just grips his hair harder and fucks into him with more force, making it impossible for Sherlock to keep his eyes on John's any longer.

*

Just as the pressure deep in his throat paired with the non-existent friction on his own cock is getting unbearable John pulls out of his mouth.

It’s an obscene sound followed by an even more obscene command for him to turn around. Hands tingling and head spinning from the pounding of his head against the headboard, Sherlock manages to gracelessly slump down to the bed and roll over to his stomach. Having his pants pushed down and then pulled off is easier this way; facing the mattress rather than John. Strong legs straddling him and John leaning down over him to pick something up from the floor by the bed. There’s finally pressure against his cock and Sherlock knows it’s undignified but can’t stop himself from rutting slightly against the mattress, relieving the edge of arousal that’s turned painful.

John moves down his body, pushing his legs apart and settling in between them. Then the sound of…

 _No_. This can not. Be happening. _John isn’t_. And yes, there was the last time, with John’s finger, but now there’s a click of a cap opening, and this feels very much like something that could turn into a disaster. John _isn’t_ … and Sherlock _is_. John _shouldn’t_.

 _Dread_. There’s no way around it.

*

Seeing Sherlock tense up from the sound of John opening the bottle of lube is nothing but a thrill. John knows thrills; they’re what he’s secretly aspired his whole life. And the thought of putting lubrication on his cock instead of his fingers and letting himself come there is enough to make his stomach make complicated movements of anticipation.

Doing this to a woman John would have licked and stimulated her breasts or clit while circling his fingers around her anus, distracting her from the slight discomfort of the initial penetration of his fingers. With Sherlock it’s different. John can’t face Sherlock while doing this to him, not yet. Still he knows that the lack of contact will be distressing to Sherlock - for reasons still unknown - and he can’t stand the thought of the way Sherlock looks almost confused when that happens, trying to swallow his reactions but failing. So after John has slid his hand down Sherlock’s spine (more firmly than he normally would, because this is Sherlock and Sherlock for some reason needs that) he lies down on his side, pressing against Sherlock’s side as he presses his finger into him without any further preparation. Sherlock jerks a bit at that, so John lets his other hand grip hard on the only part of Sherlock that he can reach from this position, which happens to be his upper arm.

The pressure and the tightness. John presses his mouth against Sherlock’s shoulder blade, first licking, then kissing. The sound Sherlock is trying hard not to let out makes John want to force more sounds out of him. Biting into the soft skin covering the scapula, John is rewarded with a hitch of breath and a moan. Hoping that it will be distraction enough, John pushes his finger deeper in.

And Sherlock takes his finger as it presses into his body. Sherlock takes the pain radiating from his shoulder blade and John is not confused as to what he wants in this moment. It’s all too obvious, really.

*

The act of anal penetration between males can be seen from two different perspectives.

This notion hits Sherlock about the same time as he feels the burn of a second finger pushing through his anal sphincter. Anal penetration could either be seen as the ultimate homosexual act or it could actually be seen as the act most resembling that of heterosexual penetrative sex, at least for the person who’s penetrating the other. With this new perspective it’s suddenly a bit easier to let it happen, to let John do this. Because it suddenly makes sense for John to want this as well, not just indulge Sherlock in his… homosexuality?

John actually wants this for his own sake.

*

The resistance offered by the muscles inside of Sherlock suddenly lessens and John’s fingers can slide in and out much more easily. He adds a third finger and sets out to find the prostate, soon feeling the knob of tissue and hitting it with his fingertip as he pushes in. Sherlock’s reaction is breathtaking; his whole body jerks and the sounds that escape are nothing but ultimately needy. Some day John will tell Sherlock not to attempt to suppress those sounds, but at this moment John’s too busy breathing to be able to get his own words out right. It doesn’t matter right now.

Deciding that three fingers ought to be enough preparation, John impatiently lifts himself up from Sherlock’s side, withdrawing his fingers and instead using his hands to pull Sherlock’s hips up, something that causes a slight moment of confusion in his friend before Sherlock understands the intention and draws his knees up, leaving his arse exposed while his face is still pressed against the pillow, his arms on either side of his head to support him.

This. This man allowing John to do this. This man wants John to do this to him, rather. The rounded arse and the exposed and stretched hole are both there to take.

Feverishly fumbling for the bottle of lube in the creases and folds of the sheets, John lets himself get high on that very thought. Stroking his own cock with lube makes him realise that Sherlock’s cock might be in a similar state of ache. John leans over to get his hand underneath Sherlock, grabbing his cock and stroking it three times before letting it jut back against the tense stomach that his own knuckles had just grazed.

The reaction is yet another proof that John Watson knows at least some things about observations and tells.

*

Bracing himself for something he knows will probably be painful, Sherlock is taken aback when there’s a sudden pressure against his buttocks and then a hand around his cock.

 _Oh_.

The sensation is… overwhelming. It releases so much and simultaneously builds up even more tension. There are more sounds escaping him but he’s past caring. The hand withdraws and it’s a struggle not to let some very different sounds escape at that loss.

Then the pressure on his buttocks eases before a hot-cold pressure finds his anus. Turning his face right into the pillow Sherlock holds his breath, waiting for the pressure to increase until it will turn painful and fierce.

He’s wanted this ever since he learned about the act of anal penetration. At first, the thought of it seemed sickening but after some exploration with his own fingers and some accompanying mental pictures of someone else doing… _that_ , Sherlock has known that it’s something that he wants very much to experience. He hadn’t, however, been able to make himself go through with it before. Not during those drug enhanced encounters at uni, before it all… _no_.

No. Don't think of that now. Instead; try to focus on John’s cock, pushing against his opening.

_It’s finally happening._

*

It’s something they’ve never talked about, because they don’t talk about such things. They don’t talk about the fact that while being straight John isn’t new to anal sex. They don’t talk about the fact that it’s perhaps easier this way; this way, John isn’t faced with a cock as he fucks into Sherlock.

And he does.

He pushes in inch by inch, feeling the tightness of the sphincters making it almost impossible to push further. Sherlock must have done this before, as Sherlock claims to have had sex before and the Sherlock John knows would try everything at least once, in the name of science or experience. They are somewhat similar in that regard, really. But even if Sherlock’s done this before it must have been a while and it feels almost like doing this to someone the very first time (which is another of those things that shouldn’t be a turn on but is, at least when coupled by the notion that this is _Sherlock_ he’s fucking).

His impulse control reaching it’s limit, John withdraws an inch and pushes back again only to stop himself from pushing even further. The body underneath him winches and tenses up even more, beautiful in it’s ability to just take what’s given. He doesn’t want to hurt Sherlock, but he does want to take him hard, pushing in, filling, coming…

...and perhaps they should have talked about condoms, but they didn’t, because they don’t talk and John does not want to do it like that, so he prefers not ask. He wants to feel this fully and he wants very much to spill into Sherlock like this and have it leak out and stick on his thighs and run down his…

_Yes._

*

It burns.

It burns very much and perhaps this is not the best of ideas. It doesn’t matter, though, because they’re doing this and Sherlock wants very much to know what it feels like to have John Watson doing this to him.

It still burns and it isn’t the least bit pleasurable. Not even the thoughts of how this must look like from the outside or the notion of just how much John is invading him, taking him and using him helps.

It burns.

*

Feeling his pelvis finally pressed firmly against Sherlock’s buttocks and having himself enclosed in Sherlock from tip to root is a heady feeling. The warmth inside his pelvis is becoming more and more pressing and it’s an act of the most advanced self-control to keep himself from thrusting.

Underneath him Sherlock is tense and John can see his fists clenched in the sheet. He knows that this is uncomfortable in the beginning, knows that from the few women that let him do this. He wants to make it easier, if for no other reason than the fact that he needs very much to move soon. He takes one of his hands from Sherlock’s hip and reaches down to stroke his cock; it’s still wet from precome and the lube that was on John’s hand when he stroked him just minutes ago.

Moans; more muffled and ambiguous than before. A slight decrease in tension around John’s cock after just a few seconds of stroking and pulling on Sherlock’s cock.

After one more minute Sherlock’s shivering slightly and John keeps stroking while he withdraws his cock just a bit and then pushes slowly back in. Sherlock tenses up again, but soon relaxes into John’s hand. He begins to move his hips in an attempt to thrust harder into John’s fist, resulting in friction against John’s own cock.

 _Finally_.

*

He feels a bit like an animal - taken from behind while a hand is strokes his cock to keep him from running away. His arse in the air and his face still pressed firmly against the pillow except for when he needs to come up for air, shifting his face slightly to the side to free his nose and mouth.

This is yet another one of those dual sensations. The intense pleasure from having his cock pressed into a fist and the intense discomfort from having his rectum filled with too much erectile tissue. It’s nothing like when he does this to himself with a dildo. This is. Real. Having someone pushing into his rectum like this gives his nervous system mixed signals and his brain interprets it into something that reminds him of needing to use the bathroom. Which is not a thought he wants at this moment. Not at all.

Then John moves behind him and it stings and it’s… better. It’s getting better.

And when John begins to move more and more intently - and then lets go of Sherlock’s cock after a few minutes - it does feel alright. The thought about what they’re doing is more arousing than the actual sensation, but Sherlock is used to that feeling by now.

Hopefully his body will get used to this too.

*

John finally lets both his hands resume their positions on Sherlock’s hips, holding him firmly and probably bruising his skin as John thrusts into him.

Keeping himself from slamming into Sherlock even harder just yet, he manages to get a few, breathless words out.

“Headboard. Grab the headboard.”

His voice is almost inaudible but Sherlock reacts. John pauses his thrusts as Sherlock awkwardly stretches one stiff and tense arm out in front of him, folding his fingers around the edge of the headboard.

The sight is dizzying. Sherlock’s pale arms bracing his body against the impact of John’s thrusts. His curls are a mess as Sherlock’s head drops between his outstretched arms and then lifts a bit as John thrusts back into him.

It’s so very close now, and John hopes that Sherlock’s body’s gotten used to the stretch by now, because he is no longer willing to hold back on slamming into Sherlock with force. The sound of their bodies colliding is amazing - the way Sherlock’s body takes the impact of the thrust is gorgeous.

Thrusting hard and pulling almost the whole way out before pushing in again, John feels his orgasm building without warning. He presses himself flush against Sherlock and jerks his hips again and again as he comes, filling Sherlock up even more.

He trashes and twists, but his hands lose their grip and John slumps against Sherlock, falls over him until Sherlock loses his balance too. Falling flat against the mattress, Sherlock makes some sort of distressed noise, and John has a distant thought that he might ought to help him, but the heaviness of his own body is too much.

John manages to come back to himself after a few seconds, collecting himself enough to withdraw slowly from Sherlock, who winces and moans at the sensation from his presumably very sore hole. Rolling slightly to his side and dragging Sherlock to his side as well, John manages to get one very shaky hand on Sherlock’s belly, fumbling until he finds his cock and then uncoordinatedly beginning to jerk him off.

It only takes a minute before Sherlock spills into his hand and John is thankful for that, because his hand is indeed very heavy from lactic acid and oxytocin.

Sherlock’s body finally relaxes back against his own, and John lets his arm stay where it is, resting against Sherlock’s side and holding him.

He’s aware that he’s been selfish in this. He’s also aware that there’s probably nothing that would reassure Sherlock more than that. John wanted this, and he took it. And it was perhaps the most reassuring thing that could have happened.

John can do this. He can have sex with a man without feeling like he’s just barely managing to keep his doubts and discomforts at bay. He can do this with Sherlock without having to fake confidence or swallow his discomfort about the fact that there’s one cock too much in the bed. Because if it feels like this then it’s not a compromise or a task; it’s a very unexpected upside to having fallen in love with a man who’s more than willing to let him do this.

Resting his cheek against Sherlock’s bony shoulder blade John finds himself almost completely at ease with it all.

_Finally._

****  
  
  


 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sensation Seeking according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Sensation seeking is a personality trait defined by the search for experiences and feelings, that are "varied, novel, complex and intense", and by the readiness to "take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences." Risk is not an essential part of the trait, as many activities associated with it are not risky. However, risk may be ignored, tolerated, or minimised and may even be considered to add to the excitement of the activity. There are people who prefer a strong stimulation and display a behavior that manifests a greater desire for sensations and there are those who prefer a low sensory stimulation. The scale is a questionnaire designed to measure how much stimulation a person requires and the extent to which they enjoy the excitement. Zuckerman hypothesized that people who are high sensation seekers require a lot of stimulation to reach their Optimal Level of Arousal. When the stimulation or sensory input is not met, the person finds the experience unpleasant.
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> Sensation Seeking in this chapter:
> 
> In the beginning of the chapter both Sherlock and John are disappointed at the lack of stimulation from the case. In addition to that, they have not been at ease at home, trying to make things run smoothly but by doing so failing to reach their usual level of stimulation; a stimulation that is often uncomfortable and confusing, but none the less a stimulation that distracts from boredom.
> 
> Both Sherlock and John are high sensation seekers in the show (and in this fic). John went to war and he moves in with a stranger who promises him danger. He comes when Sherlock promises dangerous situation and he’s miserable when not faced with something intense. Sherlock takes unnecessary risk as a habit, doing everything in his power to keep himself from getting bored (“boredom susceptibility”). He’s also turned to drugs, which is not uncommon with high sensation seekers.
> 
> As for the rest of the chapter, both John and Sherlock crave /more/, even when it’s uncomfortable or even painful. The novelty of the experience is more important than the pleasure, in some aspects. And there’s risk taking behavior in both of them; both in regards to not having discussed this before it happens and in not using condoms even if they are not sure that the other person is clean.
> 
> All in all; they both crave novelty and sensations to a high degree. When faced with routines and the lack of intense stimulation both of them cringes and begin to act out, one way or another. Whether this is a positive or negative trait is impossible to tell; it depends so much on how you choose to handle it.
> 
> (and for these two, it’s taking risks to prove they’re clever)
> 
> ***
> 
> About consent in this chapter; as mentioned in the chapter notes, I've been pointed to the fact that some readers found this scene disturbing. Not only due to the lack of explicit consent - a reoccurring issue in my stories, I realised once I was made aware of it - but mainly because of Sherlock's reactions to it. 
> 
> Do I still view this as consensual even though Sherlock at given moments finds it painful, too much and realises he doesn't like some of it? 
> 
> Yes. I do. And this is controversial, but here's my reasoning;
> 
> Sherlock finds it uncomfortable, humiliating, too much and not especially satisfactory. He battles with his instinct to withdraw and get away.   
> Still.   
> Still he doesn't want to stop it. Not because of what John might think or say, but because Sherlock wants to see this through for his own sake. This is something he's imagined for a long time, and fantasised about. It's not like his fantasies, it's not even good at times, but he wants to know what it's like. It's not because it's expected of him or because John wants it. It's not because of some misguided feeling of having committed to it and now having to see it through because he'd led someone on. 
> 
> Sherlock wants this for his own sake. He doesn't particularly enjoy it. He's actively distressed at points. But he wants it still. Perhaps he won't want to do it again, but he wants to at least having done it this once. And when it comes to sex, that's controversial. But we all do this in some parts of our lives. We try the roller coaster that we're terrified of, because we want to know if we can do it. We agree to hold that speech that makes us nauseated just to think of, because we want to be able to do it. We do that tattoo that we want even if every minute of it is agonising.
> 
> It's sensation seeking, or it's self-discovering. At times it's testing the limits. It's trying out if we've discarded something we might actually enjoy. 
> 
> It's not always a great experience. But we do it because we want to know what it's like. And for some people, that's how you discover what kind of sex you like.


	8. Opponent Process Theory

 

 

It’s always easier when they don’t talk about it.

Not necessarily better, but certainly easier.

This might be the reason that when two warm bodies with too rapid breaths slowly transitions into _sticky_ hot _humid_ bodies with relatively normal breathing rate, nothing is said.

The heat of John’s body and the discomfort of their position make it difficult for Sherlock not to constantly shift and adjust himself. He finds himself trying to count John’s breaths in order to focus on something - _anything_ \- outside of himself.

 

 

John stirs. Moving clumsily, unused to sharing his sleeping space with another person. From the pattern of his breathing Sherlock had already been aware that John wasn’t asleep, but well on the edge to it. Now his movements speak of drowsiness followed by sudden surfacing towards a more alert state, which in turn makes Sherlock relax his body fully, willing John to believe that he’s asleep.

It doesn’t matter, but it's somehow crucial. The thought of John attempting to talk to him, attempting to meet his eyes, asking him if he’s alright--

He’s not a good enough lier when it comes to John.

 

 

Ten minutes pass and Sherlock is still in his own bed, now with John wrapped partly around him from behind, and Sherlock's willing himself not to focus on how every single fold of the rumpled sheet underneath him seem to be cutting into his skin. John breathes against his scapula. His breaths are even and surprisingly pleasant against Sherlock’s skin. It ought to tickle, but it doesn’t. It might be the heat that does it. Or the humidity. Either way, those breaths are the only thing that feels tolerable at this moment. The only thing that isn’t poking at him and willing him to stir. The pressure behind his sternum is increasing in a way that will soon cause Sherlock to physically trying to ease it.

It takes four minutes of restraining himself from moving, squirming or even breathing too fast - not to mention keeping himself from pushing John away so he will finally have room to breathe - but John finally falls back into sleep.

As John’s breathing is once more shallow and relaxed, Sherlock is faced with another problem. He recognises that this is one of those situations when he needs to make a decision. It’s not even a big one - not if you put it into perspective, and Sherlock is someone who constantly puts everything he does into perspective. But for now Sherlock is in a limbo of _could haves_ and _should haves_ , and a limbo - a place in-between - is not somewhere he’s ever been comfortable. Not knowing, not deciding, is like pins and needles on the inside of his forearms, an almost physical manifestation of uncertainty.

 _Staying_ or _leaving_.

It’s as simple as it gets.

Decision making has never, however, been easy when under the influence of increased oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphin or testosteron. Having another person close will further disable what little ability Sherlock has to form plans or make decisions.

 _Leaving_ would be a relief - he needs an instant way of relieving the pressure that’s making his ribs ache and his skin crawl and he needs not to be in the presence of John when the low-grade panic he senses as a distant rumble eventually evolves into something much more deafening and explosive.

 _Staying_ is what he should want - he does want the proximity (that he doesn’t want to want), he does really want to know how it feels to lie here sated, fucked, filthy and with John’s arm still around his waist (the pressure of his arm is soon going to force Sherlock to move) and he does want to want to sleep here beside John, because doing so would somehow lessen the feeling of this - of _them_ \- being something temporary.

But temporary is all it will ever be. John doesn't want a man and Sherlock doesn't want to want this; it's set up for disaster. Leaving would at least not push it to the limit the way staying might do - causing John to panic even further by implying that Sherlock wanted… _more_ \- and if this is going to blow up in their faces, Sherlock would at least like to be dressed.

As John shifts once more in his sleep, now turning his back to Sherlock and pulling most of the duvet with him, it only takes a shiver caused by the cold air against his skin for Sherlock to finally act on the panic that is slowly eating away at his breast bone.

(John doesn't stir as Sherlock closes the door behind himself, his clothes forgotten on the floor beside the bed.)

 

 

As he steps on the threshold to the bathroom, Sherlock’s expects to find himself scratching at his own chest to be able to breathe, expects an intense craving for the (questionable) release offered by the blue pills in John’s long-forgotten pill bottle, expects his hands to be shaking with the need for anything to dull out the pressure that has been been building up ever since John slumped down on top of him, sated and unsteady, leaving Sherlock with nothing but the silence of the room and the sound of their joint breaths.

But there’s no tremor in his hands as he closes the bathroom door behind him. There’s no increase in the pressure that had threaten to make him snap, lash out and maladapt just minutes ago. As he turns the lock on the door, Sherlock doesn’t find himself craving a release.

The pressure isn’t gone, but it’s declining, and instead of finally allowing himself to act upon the need to ease it, Sherlock takes three hesitant steps until he’s faced with the bathroom mirror.

A breath is let out, a breath is let in. It aches where John fucked into him. A throbbing, dull ache that seems to further decrease the pressure, grounding him in the body that sometimes feel so distant from his mind.

And there’s only this--

He’s filthy, used, sore, sticky with semen and sweat and saliva and lube and though he doesn’t feel alright, he wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s simply a version of himself that has transitioned from a detailed but diaphanous vision into something that’s unfiltered, palpable and tastes almost bitterly of harsh realism. It has outlines, consequences and it’s not just taking place inside his head.

It’s better, when it’s real.

_(It’s incisive, when it’s real.)_

 

* * *

 

 

“Case?”

John's voice.

Sherlock almost startles, hastily raising his eyes from the laptop, then allowing them to drift back to the screen again.

11.46 pm. John's standing in the doorway to the kitchen, the warm light from the lamp in the sitting room surrounding his rumpled figure. Pyjama bottoms and jumper, his hair only half-heartedly flattened, seemingly by two hands and a bit of water. A compromise between relaxed and guarded.

Sherlock wonders if this is a conscious decision on John's part, like his own appearance - body newly showered and dressed in fresh pyjama but his hair still a tangled mess, a bit flat on his left temple. Visual reminders, he knows, evokes very vivid memories. And no matter what happened or what he thinks about it, he wants John to be reminded that it had happened.

If he won't be able to forget than neither should John.

(These kind of things take some getting used to, and neither of them know how to adapt to things that aren't dangerous, absurd or all-consuming. Then again, perhaps this could prove to be all of these things. Or it could end before it got a chance to become anything but absurd. It's a difficult distinction.)

“Mycroft,” says Sherlock, eyes still on the screen.

It will have to suffice as answer, because it's an unusually interesting little problem that his brother has sent him, and it's been two and a half hours since Sherlock left his own bedroom, anticipating an explosion of nameless, useless… _sentiment_ , pathological responses. But then the ground hadn't begun to shake and there had been no signs of bombs detonating. Instead - only this thought; _so this is what it feels like_. And Sherlock so rarely got to experience that kind of silent lack of reaction, so he'd settled in front of his laptop as soon as he had gotten out of the shower and had seen his brother's text, containing a link to an encrypted forum page, and Sherlock was now reluctant to break that frail balance between _not too much_ and _not enough_.

“Tea?”

Sherlock nods vaguely towards the kitchen counter where the kettle is still warm and three boxes of tea are slumped around it.

“Fine,” John sighs, and passes behind Sherlock's chair to reach the counter and turn the kettle on once again, moving the dirty pile of knives a bit further from the edge of the counter kitchen counter next to the sink while he waits for the kettle to boil.

 

They’re speaking in one-word sentences, not meeting each other’s gaze and Sherlock’s throat is still slightly sore from before. John is scratching his neck the way he only does when he’s trying not to be uncomfortable and while none of this is exactly ‘intimate’, it’s still a shift from the stiff air of remorse and poor impulse control on previous occasions.

 

John leaves the kitchen and return a minute later with his phone, most likely found on the floor of Sherlock’s room. The kettle clicks, and John distractedly pours himself a cup while still reading on his phone that he's placed on the counter next to his mug.

As John settles down by the table, mug in front of him and phone still in hand, reading, Sherlock knows that while this isn’t quite as effortless as it used to be - before tachycardia and inadvisable kissing and oral sex in the kitchen - it’s slowly approaching their baseline for normality.

Slowly. Shakingly.

  
(It might even be something that it’s possible to allow yourself to adapt to.)

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opponent Process Theory according to Wikipedia:
> 
> "Richard Solomon developed a motivational theory based on opponent processes. Basically he states that every process that has an affective balance, (i.e. is pleasant or unpleasant), is followed by a secondary, "opponent process". This opponent process sets in after the primary process is quieted. With repeated exposure, the primary process becomes weaker while the opponent process is strengthened."
> 
> And a snippet from (http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Opponent%20Process%20Theory):
> 
> "A theory suggested by Solomon where emotional reactions to a stimulus are followed by opposite emotional reactions. This theory may explain why stunt people enjoy their work. First the individual will feel intense anxiety before performing a stunt and then the person will receive an opposite reaction of relief after the stunt is completed. The theory also postulates that repeated exposure to the stimulus will cause less of an initial reaction and a stronger opposing reaction. This may explain why drugs, such as opiates, give diminishing returns after prolonged use yet the effects of withdraw become more intensified and unpleasant."
> 
> * * * * 
> 
> Opponent Process Theory in this chapter:
> 
> Both Sherlock and John have had strong emotional reactions after each time they've either attempt to talk about what's going on (the things they do not speak of) or have been in a physically intimate position (a.k.a. "making out or fucking"). 
> 
> John's primary emotional reactions have seemingly been guilt (over not wanting this the way he imagines Sherlock does), shame (over still doing it, and over finding some of it very hard to do on a sexual level) and just like Sherlock there seems to be some part of unverbalised anger towards the other, most likely because both of them considers themselves to be the one with the most to loose if this went south, and they both experience lack of control due to this.
> 
> Sherlock's primary emotional reactions have also included shame and guilt (over what he wants and how he wants it and over 'imposing' his sexuality on John), anger (same reason as John, but additional frustration over finding himself in a situation that is seemingly similar to the one with Samuel), self-loathing (there's really a lot of that in this verse) and panic.
> 
> We only see Sherlock's POV in this chapter, but it's likely that both of them expect to react in line with previous reactions after physical intimacy. Perhaps they even expect a stronger reaction than before ('blow up in his face') due to the increased intensity of both physical contact and the element of D/s that they're (very unnegotiatedly) expolring. Initially, Sherlock's reaction does follow the previous pattern - shame, negative thoughts of himself and a steadily growing panic that will most likely turn into a major--
> 
> ... but it doesn't. It doesn't quite follow pattern. Because the panic declines all by itself, without him leaving the flat, turning to chemical aids or having a panic attack. It doesn't turn destructive, and it's something he finds himself surprised by, in light of previous similar situations.
> 
> And for John, the same pattern apply. He doesn't seem to panic - he even falls asleep. In the beginning of what later turned into sex, John is worried about being able to do this, but during and after, he finds himself surprised that he not only manages to do it - he actually thrives a bit on it this time.
> 
> In light of the (somewhat stretched) theory presented above, you could say that their initial emotional response (primary process, negative) has been weakened by repeated exposure to the situation, and that the secondary reaction (opponent process, vaguely positive or 'relief') has been strengthened.
> 
> In the end, perhaps some things are possible not only to get used to, but also to accept or even embrace.
> 
> (That being said, this is probably still not the healthiest of ways to fall into a relationship...)


	9. Compensation, part I

 

 

The waiting room at the A&E is steadily filling up with people, there were no scrubs in John’s size left on the shelves when he arrived for his shift and Selma is clearly in a mood.

Somehow, all these things seem to serve the purpose of making John feel almost relieved.

“No. Please say it’s not Kathleen again. I cannot deal with Kathleen now. Please. Please…”

Selma drops her forehead repeatedly against the paper-covered surface as she mutters her ‘pleases’.

John just shakes his head and continues writing down his exam notes of their last patient, knowing that Selma only ever allows herself these kinds of blatant displays of her uneven moods when it’s just the two of them, and while she seems far more restless and antsy than usual tonight, she does her job, and that’s all he needs right now. 

Selma is usually the only one who actually volunteers to handle Kathleen, who is a mildly demented woman with constant pain issues, but today, there doesn't seem to be a trace of her usual willingness to handle all the patients that the other staff-members are more than happy to assign to someone else.

The thing with Selma is that she’s consistent in her inconsistency. As long as there are patients, discussions of most things related to her work or she’s got a task at hand (a task she sees as ‘meaningful’, at least), Selma is efficient, skilled, steady at hand and has a somewhat even temper, if still a bit more animate and racy than most of their colleagues. Taking every chance to practise, Selma's also far more accomplished when it comes to medical procedures and using most of the equipment than most after only having worked two years as a nurse. Then there are the times in-between. During the times in-between patients, tasks and work, Selma is... clumsy. John’s overheard someone saying that she’s ‘just too much’ of everything, and while he - who’s living with the world’s only consulting mercurial storm - might not fully agree, John can’t deny that Selma is rather more variegated than most people in the health care system. As far as social interactions go, John can see that Selma is clearly trying to hold her enthusiasm back as well as her sudden dives into certain topics, but she seems to be hold those things back with rather slippery hands, and more often than not, the things she tries to hold back seems to end up splattered on the floor in the break room.

Selma resumes her cleaning of the room as John feels the phone buzzes in the pocket of his slightly too large scrubs. Only one buzz. A text, then.

John swipes over the screen to reveal a message from his sister, and feels his stomach drop. It’s not the words in themselves - they are harmless enough; an inquiry over whether John still has the extra keys to their parents’ caravan - but any thought of Harry inevitably makes him uncomfortable. It reminds him too much of things he’s got no desire to think about. And the mere fact that he feels this way is enough to make him ashamed that he reacts that way when thinking about his sister, and the guilt… well; guilt is a very slippery slope.

“Let’s get to it,” John says, shifting his focus from the sensations brought up by the text. It’s an act he’s very skilled at - shifting his focus from things that would otherwise have threatened to… affect him. He has the army, and med school, to thank for that.

John might not be able to fix everything, especially not in the mess that was his childhood and adolescence, but as a doctor, he gets results. There’s never been anyone - perhaps save Sherlock during one of his strops - who’s ever questioned that fact.

No matter what happened two nights ago, John is here now, at the A&E, doing his very best.

At times, it almost feels like it’s enough.

 

* * *

 

 

By the time they get a chance to have their break, Selma is visibly tired, but far less irritable.

“So,” she says as they head to the cafeteria instead of going to the crowded lunch room, “did you put your flatmate out of his misery, then?”

John had very much hoped that she wouldn’t bring their last conversation up again. Yesterday he’d only seen her in passing, her shift ending just an hour after his shift started, and he’d only just managed to slip her an apology for what had happened two nights before, hoping that that’d be it on the subject.

Apparently, it won’t be.

“Of sorts,” John says, hoping that his uninterested tone and the way he scrolls on his phone as they make their way through the mostly empty corridors will make it clear that the subject should be dropped.

Selma, normally able to read enough from his tone to get the picture, seems to completely miss it this time.

“Of what sorts?”

“What’s with you tonight?” John asks, aware that it’s a deflection.

“With me?”

“Yeah, you seem a bit… not yourself.”

He’s close to saying ‘antsy’, or perhaps ‘moody’, but stops himself. Living with Sherlock, he’s learned that while ‘overgrown child’, ‘lazy git’ and ‘fucking strop’ is fully acceptable ways to address him when in a mood, but that any mention of ‘emotions’ or ‘moods’ will earn him nothing but even more thunderous moods.

“Tired,” Selma says, looking like she might say something more, but stopping herself.

“Only three hours left,” John offers, standing aside to let an orderly with a old man in a wheelchair pass them by in the corridor.

“Yeah,” Selma mutters, fidgeting with something in her pocket. “But how did you ‘sort of’ put your friend out of his misery?”

Back to this again.

“We cleared the air a bit.”

They had, and then there had been… the _thing_ that John doesn’t really want to think about. No more than he wants to think about Harry. Scrap that; he wants to think about what he’d done to Sherlock even less than he wants to think about how he’d messed up with his sister.

John feels his face grow warm at the mere thought of how he’d… What he’d done, and what he’d said, and the way that he’d just allowed himself to take and to--

They hadn’t talked about it. And things had been better at 221B after that. Not good, but it had been better in that tense way that things sometimes get better when two people are making an effort not to upset the fine balance between them by doing anything that could even remotely upset the other.

(It had been nice at first, being almost back to their old selves, if one disregarded a certain carefulness, but before his shift today, John had found that he felt almost claustrophobic in the flat with all the things that they didn’t mention filling every surface of the flat.)

John is happy that they do not talk about it, do not approach it, because if they did, he’d have to acknowledge that he had in fact done all those… things to Sherlock. And even worse, that he’d enjoyed it. That he’d gotten off on it. That--

_Well_. It had been two good days, at least. John had managed to help Sherlock with some of his experiments as well as cooking a dinner he knew Sherlock enjoyed and were more likely to eat than most other meals, and there had been some rather companionable time spent watching telly. John had even managed to write up two cases, which was always a good thing, since cases posted on the blog often led to new cases for Sherlock to solve.

“What does that even mean?” Selma said, suddenly seeming energetic, her face animated and her movements dramatic.

Selma is like a kid on an on-and-off sugar rush tonight. It helps, because whenever someone is having a mood, or a temper, John’s own mood seems to automatically tune in and adjust itself so that it’s a counterweight to the other person’s lability.

“It means,” John says, rubbing his hand against the back of his head, feeling the stiff muscles, “that we both made some things clear.”

“And he’s still around?”

“He’s still around, yes. We’re friends, above all, and despite the fact that what you had to see was not… our finest moment, believe me when I say that that’s not the worst we’ve been through.”

They reach the cafeteria as John says this, and Selma looks thoughtful for a moment, forgetting to stand aside to let the queue move past her.

John pulls her to the side, hiding the tension that is suddenly manifesting in his face.

_ Friends _ .

Above all. 

It’s so easy to forget sometimes, John knows. In the midst of awkward kisses and conversations neither of them wants to have and brutal fucking and--

_ Shit _ .

Selma grabs an energy drink, a soda, three different kinds of candy and a doughnut.

“Don’t even say it,” she mutters, and it takes John a few seconds to realise that she’s referring to Sherlock’s mentions of her assumed bulimic tendencies.

He shakes his head, smiles, and grabs a sandwich.

 

* * *

 

Going from  _ acting _ like she was on a sugar high to actually  _ being _ on a sugar high apparently doesn’t make much of a difference in Selma’s case, and as they are finally putting making their way to the staff room to grab their things after having finished off their shift, Selma is laughing tiredly.

“Well, I guess I should wish you a good night’s sleep, regardless of the amount of Red Bull you’ve consumed during the shift,” John says, checking his phone for messages. 

“I will sleep,” Selma says, making it sound more like a chore than something much needed.

She hesitates, and her nervous tic of blinking rapidly makes a brief appearance before she summons herself.

“Thank you,” she says, aiming for casual, but missing. “I was a bit off today, and I didn’t want to… I- I forgot to renew my prescription before I ran out of my meds. I get like this- then. Sometimes. So, yeah. Anyway.”

She grabs her woven bag, pulling out her own phone, seemingly absorbed, but John knows deflection when he sees it, and while he’s happy to call Sherlock on it, he honestly has no need to do so with Selma.

“Right, see you tomorrow, then,” he says, heading towards his locker room.

“Friday,” she corrects him. “I have the day off tomorrow.”

He raises his hand to a wave, and opens a new text message, hoping for the words to emerge.

The door closes behind him, and the message remains unwritten.

 

* * *

 

When he was younger, John had often ended up in trouble because of his reactiveness. He was never particularly reactive at home, where the chaos of his sister and his father had taken up all the available emotional space, but in school and with friends, his mood had constantly gotten him into situations he had not planned to end up in. It hadn’t just been the anger, although that was the most visible problem. He’d often ended up with bruises after a fight, but just as often, he’d ended up not coming to school at all, the black surge in his stomach too heavy for him to be able to move anywhere with ease. Before anger became his secondary emotional response to every other negative feeling that overwhelmed him, he’d spent more than his fair share of time hidden in the bathroom stalls at school, just trying not to feel as it would all come crashing down on him if he left that safe cubicle and had to face even one more person.

It all seems distant now. John tamed his nervousness and the black surge - the vacuum - inside him with anger, and when his anger stopped him from getting where he wanted, he learned to tame his anger by distraction. It wasn’t by far a fail safe system, and the last few weeks had reminded him of that in no uncertain terms, but it was a system, and mostly, it worked. He had managed to tame his his temper. After a while, it became who he was. He was known for his even temper and friendly manner both in the army and during his later years of medical training. He relished it every time someone mentioned his mild manners, because it was something he had to work hard in order to accomplish. For some reason, it made it all that easier to accept on those few occasions when his mild manners cracked, revealing the temper that he had almost managed control. And if he still ended up shouting and throwing things whenever he had talked to Harry during his early days in uni, well; that was more on her than on him, right? And he managed important things; he saved lives. Wasn’t that more important than the occasional slip-up of his temper?

And living with Sherlock, things were suddenly easier, somehow, because next to that man’s affective instability, John’s temper seemed like a summer’s breeze. His control was a counterweight to Sherlock’s lack of control in-between the cases. In-between the distractions. Because the cases and the experiments and the projects were Sherlock’s distractions, but Sherlock was John’s distraction.

Or, so it had been, until the day when Sherlock had ordered John out of their flat.

Suddenly, Sherlock is no longer a distraction. Sherlock has become the trigger. The catalyst - no; not the catalyst, because the catalyst remains intact during the reaction it causes. Sherlock has in no way been unaffected by the reactions he’d provoked in John.

There’s shame in losing control. And John’s control is slipping.

The thing is, they both react to shame in the same way; by acting like there’s nothing to be ashamed of. By pretending that whatever happened, it was intentional. And by not ever talking about it.

And as John changes tube on his way home, one thing suddenly becomes clear.

There is no reason as to why Sherlock would pretend that nothing had happened, that nothing was amiss, unless he too felt it.

Shame.

What John cannot pinpoint, however, is the exact source of Sherlock’s shame.

John might not excel at handling his own temper at all times, but there is one area in which he’s certainly excels - in which he’s outshone every other single person who’s ever dared to try - and that is the area of being a friend and companion to Sherlock Holmes.

  
And no matter how fucked up things might be, John will not allow himself to fail on that.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Compensation according to Wikipedia:
> 
> In psychology, compensation is a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or (drive towards) excellence in another area. Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one's difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority. There are two kinds of negative compensation:
> 
> Overcompensation, characterized by a superiority goal, leads to striving for power, dominance, self-esteem, and self-devaluation.
> 
> Undercompensation, which includes a demand for help, leads to a lack of courage and a fear for life.
> 
> A well-known example of failing overcompensation, is observed in people going through a midlife-crisis. Approaching midlife, many people lack the energy to maintain their psychological defenses, including their compensatory acts.
> 
>  
> 
> ***
> 
>  
> 
> Compensation in this chapter:
> 
>  
> 
> The most prominent (for me) compensation in this chapter is the way John attempts to cover up his problems with rage, mood and also his percieved failings when it comes to his sister by excelling in things 'that matter' - saving life, helping Sherlock solve cases and fighting in the war. He gradually learns to control most of his temper, but he's still bother by any sign of it, and as soon as that feeling of unease surfaces, John is quick to think about the Good Things he does, and that is also what everyone else sees too, with perhaps a few exceptions. He also uses the life he lives with Sherlock to cover up some of his problems; standing besides Sherlock, John does seem calm, unless one looks a bit closer. And he gets an outlet for his frustration and his moods while working on cases, no doubt.
> 
> In this chapter it's also clear that he can't really handle the thought of the way he feels that he's treated Sherlock during their sexual encounters - he's clearly bothered by his own desires and the way he acts during these moments, and he seems to counteract this negative emotion - the one he can't handle - by thinking about all the good things he does for Sherlock, and the way he sees himself as a caregiver, almost. He needs that picture of himself in order to handle the other picture - the one of himself as someone who can be brutal and use people for his own pleasure. Earlier in this story, we see that John often does this, and we also see him be far more bold and daring in the physical contact with Sherlock than he might be comfortable with just to prove to Sherlock that he's not bothered by being with a man sexually (which he clearly is in the beginning).
> 
> When it comes to Selma, I'd say that her compensation is perhaps more visible to others than John's is. In her case, it comes down to managing what she - and a majority of those around her - percieves as a 'disability'. As mentioned in the notes to 'Impulse control', she's more than aware that her behaviour in general makes people think of her as less than professional, but even when she's on her meds, she cannot fully compensate for this. Working really hard to achieve great skill in her profession gives her a certain leeway, something that she has learnt to work with. She practises her skills, takes on the most difficult patients and she is in fact natural when it comes to the social interactions with patients - a not uncommon phenomenon amongst people who are in generally not naturals when it comes to social interactions that fits into the norm but has found a professional role in which they feel comfortable, stimulated and see a purpose and a pattern to the social interactions. 
> 
> In this chapter, however, her behaviour is tuned up a bit due to not having taken her medication. 
> 
> As many people on the neuropsychiatric spectrum might, Selma uses her intelligence to cover up some of her 'symptoms' (as does Sherlock), sometimes in rather inventive ways, but there are limits even to what the highly intelligent can do to override the fact that their neurology is in fact different from that of the majority, which leads to a different perception, handling of sensory input, ability to regulate focus and resisting impulses and much more.
> 
> And when it comes to Sherlock’s compensation… well; let it be said that next chapter will be Compensation part II, because there were quite a few things to be said on that subject...


	10. Compensation, part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, don’t look so scandalised. I think we’d both enjoy it very much,” Sherlock says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think of this chapter as having the subtitle “somewhat dysfunctional variations of 'foreplay’ - kink negotiations without the negotiations”.

 

 

To Sherlock, the relief is palpable even before they reach the crime scene.

An interesting case is usually the best thing that Sherlock could hope for, but tonight it is more than that - it’s what he needs and it’s something that might possibly restore the fragile balance that has been tipped to the side due to the distortions in 221B during the past few days.

“So, Sherlock, what do you make of it?” Lestrade asks, keeping an eye on Sherlock and John where they're hunched on the floor, rapidly flipping through book after book before discarding them.

It’s a break in, which would normally not be interesting enough for Sherlock to even consider answering Lestrade’s text, but this one had proved to be something special; it's the third in a row of break ins where nothing has been disturbed except for the bookshelves. All the books have been thrown out, some appear to be missing and page thirteen is missing in almost all of the fictional works while the non-fiction seems to just have been shoved down onto the floor. The thing that is different about this break in is the fact that there’s a man lying dead on the balcony of the flat, a man that most certainly isn't the resident of the flat; a Miss Sheila Rogers.

“Could you at least try to be a bit careful? Those haven’t been dusted for fingerprints yet!" one of the new crime scene techs snaps while seemingly holding herself back from just grabbing the books from Sherlock's hands.

This particular tech is one of the few on the force that seems to think that Sherlock's reputation as both a freak and a sociopath is exaggerated, and who is therefore  willing to argue with him.

The question is not worth a reply, so none is given. There had been no fingerprints other than those of the owners of the books in the first two break ins, so the chance is beyond slim that there will be any now.

Sherlock sees John turn to face the tech, and Sherlock turns his attention back to the book in his hand before he has to observe the usual display that John uses when he wants to smooth over Sherlock's behaviour; his weak, boyish smile, followed by a shrug which communicates some kind of mutual understanding.

It’s hateful, in a way.

(It’s useful, and that should really be all that matters, but it isn’t.)

“Knives!” Sherlock exclaims, jumping to his feet.

He has to keep himself from twirling around on the spot - a compulsion that's best kept inside the walls of his own flat.

“Knives?”

John’s voice comes from where he’s still hunched on the floor, looking up at Sherlock with patience, awaiting further explanations.

There's an undeniable satisfaction in seeing John like this - steady, patient, ready to follow Sherlock’s commands in a way that makes work far more effective than it ever was before John. As of lately, there's been a new undercurrent beneath that familiar satisfaction, something that's more carnal than the situation might warrent. Sherlock attempts to ignore it, but it's still there, stealing a fraction of his attention away from what should be its full focus; the case.

“They used something to cut the pages out. In the photos from the previous burglaries, the remains of the page were sharp. But look at this--”

John gets to his feet and looks at the book Sherlock's holding open to where the stump of a page is all there's left.

“Ah, yes,” John says, thoughtful as he examines the frayed edge of paper. Then, turning to Greg: “Were there any knives missing at the previous crime scenes?”

“Hang on, let me check.”

In the time it takes for Lestrade to get the requested information, Sherlock has managed to get into a verbal fight with one of the sergeants, identify the victim (the flat owner’s landlord) and deduce that the thieves were looking for something either water stamped or written in some kind of invisible ink on the thirteenth page of a book. When Lestrade confirms that there most likely had been knives missing from both previous crime scene (one of the victims wasn't certain in regards to the number of knives he had to begin with), Sherlock is already out the hall, arguing loudly with the crime scene tech again.

By the time they leave the building, Sherlock has almost solved the case - “brilliant!” - and unintentionally insulted a key witness; the man living next door where the break in had taken place - “more than a bit not good, Sherlock. You have no right to tell the whole floor about the poor man’s childhood traumas!”. Sherlock proceeds to deduce (somewhat more quietly) that it was John’s own history of childhood trauma that made him react so strongly to Sherlock’s miscalculation in regards to which deductions he ought to keep to himself. (Sherlock knows these things, he does - mostly - but he’d been a bit… swept away in the rush of the case and had in fact forgotten that there were neighbours nearby who could overhear him). The last deduction, the one about John, had lit something more than a bit not good in John’s eyes, and for once it had been John who left without a word. Luckily, John had been waiting outside the building, and they proceeded to take a cab back to Baker Street.

Sherlock manages to crack an unusually morbid joke during the cab ride, but John’s lips doesn’t even quirk up.

“Brilliant” won’t always be enough, and Sherlock knows this.

 

*

 

As the suburban streets and the red post boxes pass by outside the windows of the cab, Sherlock fights the urge to fidget with something - a nervous tell that he knows that John will pick up on.

The case had been too easy and the rush never culminated, something which always leaves Sherlock with a grey, dull feeling deep in his gut. John is demonstratively not talking to him, and normally, that’d be annoying, but right now, Sherlock finds that John's anger feels far more genuine (and therefore less disturbing) than the behaviours in which John has engaged himself in over the past few days.

Ever since they'd last ended up engaging in sexual activities (John asking him to grab the headboard, pressing into his body again and again, holding Sherlock there, his breathing heavy and-- _no_ ), there's been a strange atmosphere in the flat, and there's not been a single raised voice, argument or provocation. They’ve behaved almost respectfully towards each other while eating take away during companionable conversations, have not pushed each others' buttons or even engaged in the usual arguments over cleaning. Sherlock knows how to behave respectfully just the way he knows how to do most things, but this is one thing he seldom bothers with, but for now - for John - he will. Still, it makes him feel… bereft.

Sherlock had allowed John to take something that John had very clearly wanted to take - which had also happened to be what Sherlock had thought he wanted as well - and he’d allowed John to see him like that, had done it despite his own instincts when it came to not allowing anyone else to know about this side of him. There'd always be that risk; the risk that he'd do something like he had done with [partially restored]. But John had liked it. They both had, in their own ways. John might have liked the physical aspect well enough, but for Sherlock it had been more about the… psychological? aspect of it. In his mind, the humiliation of his own submission and the way John had used his body to derive his own pleasure from had been on repeat more or less constantly since then, causing dryness of the mouth, palpitations and a tingling sensation in his midsection.

Sherlock; ever the freak. Only, in this he is another kind of freak than the kind Donovan sees.

John had allowed been allowed to see that, but what had come from it had been the very definition of anticlimax. They haven’t spoken about it, there haven’t been any tells in the way they move when in close proximity of each other, and there hasn’t been a single hint about John wanting to do it again, despite clearly having enjoyed it far more than anything they’ve done previously. Instead of another rough shagging (with John calling him increasingly depraved things while letting his hand find Sherlock’s thro-- _no_ ), all Sherlock had gotten was the awful, hateful politeness and attentiveness of John the Thoughtful Flatmate.

It is, in short, beyond unsatisfactory.

(If something doesn’t happen soon - if there won't be any sexual contact very soon - perhaps John will get his way, and this will all fall back into some kind of hateful platonic limbo once more. It would be unbearable, and whatever John wants, Sherlock is fairly certain that it isn’t to force a wedge into their companionship, but it is what it will end up being, this new… politeness.)

Beside him, John is silent in a very loud way, and Sherlock knows that he’s holding back and that whatever it is John's trying to temper down will probably be mostly repressed before they even get home, but part of him wishes that John just wouldn't do that.

There’s been too much holding back.

Holding back is for safety, but apart from a few, chosen areas in his life, Sherlock has never valued safety. Neither has John, except in this, which doesn’t make sense, because this was all John’s ludicrous idea from the start. John’s borderline self-destructive attempt at keeping Sherlock-- It can’t be an attempt at staying safe that makes John hold back now. So, what has a stronger hold on John than fear?

The answer hits Sherlock at the same time as he looks over to John, who is pointedly looking away from him, because that’s what John does when he knows that if he even looks at Sherlock when being this furious, he’ll explode, and right now John refuses to do so, because at the moment, John refuses to be upset with Sherlock, because he won’t allow himself to be after what---

_Oh._

 

*

 

The conclusion Sherlock's reached requires some thinking, and at the moment John’s loud refusal to shout and have his frustration - as well as so many more interesting things - out in the open is not compatible with thinking, so Sherlock shuts himself into his room as they get home, thinking about the matter at hand.

Eventually, some of the thoughts he needs to examine in order to do this leads to some inevitable physical reactions, which in turn leads to a problem that needs dealing with.

Afterwards, as he stands in the shower, washing away the semen on his abdomen and feeling the warm water sting against his chafing nipples, Sherlock decides on what direction he’ll take.

It will not be within his comfort zone, but then none of this has been. In fact, this has all been the very opposite of ‘comfortable’.

And he’s not aroused after having come just minutes ago, but he still finds himself pinching his left nipple, feeling the already tender skin burn. The pain is just this side of interesting, and it’s just endorphins anyway; it’s simple neurochemistry that he’s using to his advantage. It shouldn’t be shameful, this; to want it. All the things that he wants - sexually - can be explained through science. Psychology, biology, neuroscience. There's a logic to it. It shouldn’t unsettle him. He ought to be able to own up to it the way he does with his personality - if you use it as a weapon, it’s less likely to be perceived as a weakness.

Love, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.

 

* * *

 

“You’re ashamed.”

The simple statement breaks the silence, and John looks up from his phone, a moment's confusion before his face betrays something far more complex.

Sherlock had inserted himself at the chair by his microscope half an hour ago, attempting to look at some old slides, but his real purpose had been to wait for John to slowly gravitate towards him the way they seem to always gravitate towards each other in time. Now John is standing a few feet away, leaning against the kitchen counter. Seconds ago, he’d been scrolling through the news on his phone. It’s an ideal situation; allowing John a sense of physical advantage due to their relative positions.

John waits for Sherlock to proceed, and Sherlock is willing to. It’s what needs to be done, and with his suit on it’s easier to merge himself into a persona - into the played confidence of someone (of some part of him) that takes pride in what he is in this regard.

“You're uncomfortable with your own behavior when you… fuck me.”

Letting the last two words pop out in a deliberately slow way, Sherlock shifts on his chair so that he’s as close to facing John as the angle will allow, looking up at him.

“Hardly your most impressive deduction,” John says, his voice steady and dry as his gaze falters.

“Why?” Sherlock asks, ignoring him.

John takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Frustration bordering on anger is lurking under his barely restrained voice.

“You really need me to put it into words?”

“That would be the most helpful way of doing it, unless you have some other means of communicating it.”

“Sherlock,” John says, words coming out in a punctuated manner that speaks volumes about John’s discomfort, “there are some things which I should not have to explain to you. Even when it comes to how bloody wrong all of this is.”

Wrong track. It’ll be a dead end, and anyway Sherlock prefers to derail conversations.

“Next time you fuck me, you should just tie me up and then use me.”

John’s face goes through so many expressions in a matter of seconds; anger, shock, arousal, _shame_. Then, his face makes up its mind, and the expression that remains is… hurt.

“Oh, don’t look so scandalised. I think we’d both enjoy it very much,” Sherlock says, knowing that his voice has taken on a cold undertone. It’s a challenge, and John will recognise it as such.

“You think so?”

Another kind of challenge, just begging Sherlock to take the bait so that John can finally explode, finally tell Sherlock just how wrong this all is.

Sherlock won’t give him that satisfaction. Instead, Sherlock will give himself away.

“I derive pleasure from being held down, tied up and from being restrained. I also find mild to moderate pain as well as certain kinds of humiliation to be sexually arousing. I’ve had this ‘inclination’ since before I understood the concept of sex. I’m sorry to hear that you find what I am to be unacceptable.”

There’s no trace of sentiment in his voice as he puts these facts, these things he’s never before voiced, into words and the ice in his voice forces the words to linger in the space between them, too solid to be dissolved by the air.

His eyes has never left John’s, and John doesn’t look away now, just stares at Sherlock, his phone now completely forgotten in his hand.

“I didn’t mean-- I’m sorry, that was…”

“I can own up to being a freak. Nothing new under the sun, isn’t that what they say? Now; what I don’t understand is this; you find what I desire to be ‘wrong’, yet you yourself don’t really want it ‘vanilla’, do you? Not with me.”

John breaks their eye contact, clearly struggling to reorder the words in his mind before finding any that would do. Sherlock continues, John’s reaction being no worse than he’d anticipated.

“And as I’ve made quite clear, that’s not something that I have any interest in either.”

There’s a few seconds of silence, then John finds his words. His word.

“Okay.”

Defeated, deflated.

“Okay,” John repeats, slowly. “You’ve made your point. I’m-- It was never you who were ‘wrong’. What was wrong was the fact that I did what I did without knowing if it was something you even wanted.”

“Since when,” Sherlock begins, his voice deliberately low, “do I ever do something I don’t want to? Unless, of course, it gives me pleasure to do it anyway?”

Their eyes meet again, and Sherlock knows it the moment he sees John’s pupils. The deflation is beginning to give way for something more intent.

It looks nothing like the loathed politeness of the past few days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Compensation was defined in the A/N on the previous chapter, but I’d like to add some to that definition in this chapter. 
> 
> Compensation is sometimes also used more freely in clinical psychiatry (at least in Sweden) as a description of what a person suffering from a psychiatric disorder or who has a neuropsychiatric diagnosis does in order to ‘compensate’ for some of the symptoms of said disorder or diagnosis by using some of their strengths or abilities, such as intelligence, knowledge, social skills, experience or mere force of will. “He compensates for some of his inattention by doing working extra hard with his homework”.
> 
> Compensation in this wider meaning could mean either that you learn to cover up some of the tells of your mental health issues or that you put in a lot more effort and energy than most to achieve the same result as they do, due to the mental health issue. You use your abilities to make up for some of your difficulties. Those difficulties may be stopping you directly from doing something you want (become good at something that requires a certain amount of consistency or attention, for example) or stop you more indirectly from acheiving your goals due to you not being able to meet the expectations of others (in your chosen field there might be certain expectations of you coming across as social and outgoing, for example).
> 
> “She has learnt to look the other person in the eye as they speak and always seems confident - you would never know she is suffering from social anxiety from just looking at her in a group! But she will always leave early, she says she gets exhausted.”
> 
> The thing to remember is this; while this kind of compensation is extremely useful and can allow many people to achieve their goals and do things they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do due to their illness/diagnosis, it costs, and the price never goes down. You often pay the same price for an action every time you do it, no matter how often you do it. It can become automatic to a certain degree, but it will always cost you energy.
> 
> ****
> 
> Compensation in this chapter:
> 
> What we see in the first part of this chapter is Sherlock’s compensation in both the traditional sense (the definition from last chapter) and the broader sense (using different abilities to make up for certain difficulties).
> 
> Working as a consultant, he would normally be required to display at least decent social skills and be cooperative, and most certainly to explain his deductions step by step in a more pedagogical way. However, he is so brilliant at what he does that he’s given quite a lot of leeway, and doesn’t have to live up to those expectations, even this inability (or unwillingness) still gives him certain disadvantages, such as being questioned all the time. Sherlock is a (former?) drug addict with (in this story) clear traits of autism spectrum disorder as well as other neuropsychiatric conditions and his personality is not an advantage in this situation. But he is a genius who excels at what he does, hence compensating. He has to prove himself over and over again, and he does. But there are other - less ‘classical’ - ways in which he compensates as well; having John with him to smooth over some things, but also to look to for advice on certain matters in which he has a harder time than most, acting like the abuse of the other doesn’t matter, using his theatrical skills to fool others and by ‘owning’ his own inabilities; ‘high-functioning sociopath’. 
> 
> In the second part of the chapter, Sherlock is wants something he doesn’t know how to ask for. This kind of communication is hard for him, and for John as well. So instead of saying right out what he wants while just being himself, he uses his ability to play act and puts on a more confident persona, making it less personal and also easier. Here, as well as with the sociopath thing, he owns up to what he thinks of as a disadvantage, in this case a strong preference towards being the submissive partner during sex, and also wanting sex with John in the first place. He uses his own put on confidence to get his point across and to ensure John that there’s nothing shameful about what he wants (something that may be true, but also something he doesn’t feel to be true).
> 
> John, on the other hand, tries to keep compensating for this behaviour during sex by being extra attentive to Sherlock and trying to put up with more of Sherlock’s eccentricities than usual without getting upset. That does, however, not seem to be very functional.


	11. Asperger's syndrome / Autism spectrum disorder part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I chose to label this as 'Asperger's Syndrome / Autism spectrum disorder criteria part II' even though the previous chapter on the diagnosis only included Asperger's syndrome, since Asperger's syndrome is now merged into the larger diagnosis of Autism spectrum disorder in DSM-V, and that is where I've taken the criteria for this chapter from.
> 
> (The criteria will only be illustrated in the first part of the chapter, while the other part consists mostly of... sex.)
> 
> As for consent, which several readers - for good reasons - have found to be problematic in this verse, I think we're moving towards a slightly more expressed consent, although we're far from all the way there. Per usual, the sex in this chapter is perhaps somewhat... 'uncomfortable', but then none of the sex written in this verse were written with the intent of being 'hot' (what does that even mean?), but rather to move the story forward, as sex is in fact a centeral theme in this story, albeit not in the usual sense. It's more about illustrating the progress and setbacks of... whatever this is to them.
> 
> Not beta read, and no matter how many times I read it, I find new errors. The English Language and I are currently having a domestic.

 

 

“So, ehm, I guess that's something that we should talk about, then.”

John finds the prospect of discussing sexual preferences with Sherlock to be about as pleasant as having one's molars removed, except there's no shame or embarrassment in having one's teeth pulled out.

“Talking? We just talked, were you not here?” Sherlock looks at John, and as always, John finds it almost impossible to tell how much of the petulance that is just Sherlock’s usual histrionics and how much is actual annoyance.

It is as it always is; Sherlock decides that conversations are over as soon as he's had his say. In a strange sort of way, John finds the consistency in Sherlock's maladaptive social manners to be both oddly comforting and somewhat problematic under the current circumstances.

“Sherlock, if you were trying to argue that whatever happened between us was fully consensual, then I think we need to ensure that we’re both have the same--”

“Of course it was.”

And there it is again. A conclusion without any attempt to explain how said conclusion was reached. Sherlock is better at not doing this at crime scenes these days, and he has learned to explain his reasoning in a way that's somewhat understandable to mere mortals, but it seems like whatever progression Sherlock's done in this regard, it's unlikely to ever extend to situations beyond those that involves the work.

It would be so easy to just accept this, take Sherlock's words at face value and never return to this topic again.

“What about me?” John still adds.

“What about you?”

“How do you know that I consented?”

“You initiated.”

There's an urge to hide his face in his hands and rub up and down over it until this conversation is over, but John fights it back. 

“I initiated. And still I am clearly not comfortable with what happened.”

Sherlock looks at him, his eyes narrowing in concentration. It's a beautiful expression, and catching a glimpse of it here, amongst dirty test tubes and awkward conversations, makes John's stomach flutter.

“Are you saying I made you do something you didn't want to do?”

“No. It's not- Look, I just think that we might need to establish exactly what each of us are OK with, alright?”

His hands are beginning to feel sweaty and John puts his phone aside, surprised to realise he's still holding it.

From the look on Sherlock's face, it seems clear that he expects John to do the talking.

John, on the other hand, has no idea where to start. By the table, Sherlock’s face is still angled up towards him, his head turned in a way that exposes his neck quite distractingly.

“So…” Sherlock says after a minute of silence. “I think that a fair conclusion would be that whatever you want to do to me is fine by me unless I say otherwise, and that you only do things to me which you yourself find… enjoyable.”

John is no expert on these matters, but he's pretty sure that that's not exactly how this is supposed to work. Still, he doesn't have a better suggestion.

“Alright,” he agrees, resigned. Then he decides to try something a bit more interesting. “Can you perhaps tell me a bit then, tell me about what things you do find enjoyable?”

Sherlock's brows raise momentarily, then his face is once again neutral.

“Wouldn't you rather find out for yourself?”

“No, I think I would very much enjoy listening to you as you clue me in on it.”

With that, John takes a step closer towards Sherlock, who is forced to angle his head even further backwards in order to keep looking at John.

After a few seconds Sherlock turns back to look at the table and his microscope.

“If you simply wish to make me uncomfortable I am certain there are more enjoyable ways to go about it.”

“I thought you weren't uncomfortable with what you wanted.”

“I'm not,” Sherlock replies, and John knows that it's a lie. A lie Sherlock tells both of them in order to enable this conversation. “I am, however, not particularly eager to voice any inclinations that you might find… pitiful. My sexual desires differ a great deal from my preferences in every other aspect of my life, and while I'm comfortable with wanting them, I am less inclined to share them.”

“And having sex with me is not ‘sharing’?”

“No. Not in that sense, at least. We seem to be somewhat compatible in this, which is the only reason you know about any of my inclinations.”

“Are you saying that if I hadn't… if I hadn't reacted in a good way to your hints at being… inclined to certain things, then you wouldn't have bothered to tell me about them?”

“Yes.”

“But Sherlock, that's-”

“Logical. If you hadn't reacted favourably that'd meant that you were unlikely to actually want these things, and then what would be the point of me asking for them?”

“I could still have wanted to try to give you what you want!”

John is frustrated, and he knows it doesn't help, knows Sherlock well enough to understand that this is a sore subject for some reason, possibly related to Sherlock's fears of ‘imposing himself’ on John sexually.

(John can't quite imagine what it would be like if Sherlock were to ever do such a thing. While John's had more than his fair share of sexual encounters, he's seldom been with anyone so single-mindedly… ‘submissive’? Now that his own sense of guilt has been somewhat eased, John is starting to see that everything about Sherlock’s behaviour in sexual situations, apart from those very first uncoordinated and too hard kisses, have  been pretty blatant when it comes to this one thing. To imagine Sherlock being decisive and forceful when they're close-- no; John finds that he can't quite picture that.)

“But then I wouldn't want it,” Sherlock blurts out in his typical deadpan way. He seems to regret it the second he says it, but he's unable to do anything about it except to attempt to explain. “It's not-- it wouldn't work if you did it out of-”

“It wouldn't be out of-” John interrupts, but is himself interrupted.

“It doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter when I can’t _know_ that you really want it! **”**

“Well, then perhaps you understand why I have a problem with what’s happened.”

“It's not the same thing!”

Sherlock is frustrated now, frustrated in the way he sometimes becomes when the world around him fails to make sense and when he in turn can't make himself understood to those around him. It's an expression of helplessness, and it makes John think of other things Sherlock turns to when he can't make sense of something. Sherlock, when reaching a breaking point, will either become a volcanic eruption or a shattered magnifying lens, irredeemably broken, the pieces of it still functioning, but the big picture lost.

John shakes those images away, attempting to focus on understanding what Sherlock is trying - and failing - to say.

“Alright, give me a minute,” John says, trying to put the pieces together. “What you're saying is that… it only works for you if there’s no doubt in your mind whatsoever that I get what I want.”

A slight ease of tension in Sherlock's shoulders is the only sign John gets, as he's unable to see his face from where he stands.

“And… you want me to take what I want. Because that way it isn't your responsibility, and you don't have to wonder about it, so you-”

Sherlock turns his head, his expression part surprise, part defeat.

John doesn't continue, doesn't say 'so that in this, you don't have to use all your focus just to interpret all those social cues the way you have to in every other situation'.

“It's an oversimplification that fails to take my own actual inclination into account, but yes.”

It makes sense, suddenly.

John believes Sherlock when it comes to it also being a very real inclination of his - Sherlock's embarrassment and fear of ridicule on the matter are proof that it's about more than practical solutions for his troubles with social skills - but John also knows that Sherlock will not acknowledge that he’s ‘having troubles’. In Sherlock’s mind, it all comes down to not seeing any real reason to bother with such things.

“Oversimplification, huh?” John says, bringing his hand up to trail his fingers from below Sherlock's ear down to the V of his shirt.

Sherlock tenses almost unnoticeable at the initial touch, but his muscles relax as John keeps his hand moving firmly.

“Yes,” Sherlock agrees, his eyes searching John's face.

John won't say that he thinks that he's just done one of his most impressive attempts at deduction as of lately, and he also won't say that figuring parts of this out has made everything about what they've done so far seem far more… comprehensible. While his own desires are still somewhat distressing to him, John finds that knowing what he now knows about how Sherlock perceives it makes it seem like much less of an issue.

“Is it also an oversimplification to say that you're a kinky shit who likes not knowing what I will do to you?”

Sherlock reacts instantly to the shift in John's voice - from teasing to downright… suggestive. There's a flutter in Sherlock's eyelids, and John can almost see how surprise gives way to anticipation.

John works two buttons of Sherlock's shirt open, the V now extending all the way down to the edge of his sternum.

Sherlock shakes his head slightly at John's question, indicating that John isn't wrong about what he said. John wonders what it would take to make Sherlock actually say more than a few words when they're touching like this, but he figures that it's just one of those things that he'll have to find out in time, if he will be allowed to continue whatever this is.

To continue. Yes. He wants that, very much.

Seeing Sherlock accepting his touch as it grows more firm and more painful is a high that goes directly to John's cock. He wants to make Sherlock take it, wants to take what he wants from the infuriating man who becomes so conformable when John touches him. John wonders how much Sherlock can take before reaching a breaking point. And, in the end, there’s the curious question of how much John himself is willing to take from Sherlock.

(Most likely it’s more than he’d care to admit to himself.)

 

A deep breath, then John watches Sherlock's face as he thinks about humiliation and thinks about pain and thinks what he is now allowed to do without any associated guilt. He doubts he could ever make himself say the things that come into mind when he thinks about ‘sexual humiliation’, because even in his head they sound like something from a really bad porno. He wonders if those things were the kind of things Sherlock had in mind when he'd said he enjoyed certain forms of humiliation.

They aren't, however, what John wants, so it isn't how this will happen.

A simple truth that makes the lingering trepidation over sex with Sherlock dissolve even further.

“Take your clothes off. All of them.”

Sherlock's eyes flick up to John, surprised, but John removes his hand from Sherlock, backing away, giving him space.

Leaning against the counter, John waits. On his chair by the table, Sherlock seems to also be waiting, watching John as if expecting some kind of clue.

After almost twenty seconds, Sherlock hesitantly gets up, steps away from the table and stands on the gritty carpet a few feet away from John, his shirt half-open under his suit jacket and his face blank.

This could be a breaking point. It could all be over before it's even begun.

John never falters in his eye contact, watching Sherlock's face instead of his body as Sherlock pulls his jacket off, hanging it over the back of the abandoned chair behind him. Steady fingers work the rest of his shirt open, pulling it out of his trousers and unbuttoning the cuffs.

Sherlock is not putting on a display, simply taking his clothes off while looking at John, his face no longer questioning. When he's untied his shoes and taken them off, Sherlock stands up once more, unbuckling his belt.

It's hard not to look at those hands as they work the zip, and it's even harder not to look when Sherlock pushes his trousers and pants down, stepping out of them and hanging them over the shirt on the chair. In a way it's like watching an accident site; you don't want to look but you can't help feeling your eyes still roaming over it.

The grey light makes everything in their messy kitchen seem so dingy and prosaic. Even Sherlock, standing there naked in front of him, his cock flaccid and resting against pubic hair and balls, his upper thighs covered with scar tissue and his gaze not faltering once while as he's waiting for John to say something, to make a move.

There’s a musty smell coming from the sink beside John and for a moment John thinks that that might be the reason that the air feels too thick. But then he feels the slight tingling in his palms, and he knows his own tells, knows that he’s beginning to panic.

It’s too much.

John doesn’t have a plan, had just begun something that he has no idea where he’s going with, and Sherlock is naked and male and without the prelude of kissing or making out that all becomes… very hard to ignore.

Sherlock shouldn’t have to settle for this, shouldn't have to settle for John and John’s inability to see past his genitals when it comes to sexual attraction.

(But this is what Sherlock has settled for, so this is what John has to deal with.)

John takes a breath, trying to come up with anything that he can do to move this ahead, but the man in front of him is making it so hard to think, to find a natural way to progress, to--

(It would have been so much easier if it had been like the previous times. The proximity and the fading light and the touching and--)

Three steps are all it takes, then John is _there_ ; his breath ghosting over Sherlock’s clavicles and his hand finding its way up into Sherlock’s hair once again. It’s smooth against his fingers, and John has always wanted to touch it. Now he can.

Grey light, even breaths. Sherlock isn’t moving, but John is.

It’s easier now, easier with the proximity blur and the tactile sensations.

Sherlock flinches slightly as John’s lips first make contact with his neck. The fingers in Sherlock’s hair tightens and lips become teeth and tongue against warm skin. John’s other hand finds Sherlock’s hip, his thumb pressing into the dip of the iliac crest, stroking firmly, his other fingers pressing into the muscle on the other side of the hipbone. Sherlock’s breathing picks up and John’s hands keep alternating the pressure, keeping the sensations unpredictable, because Sherlock’s likes unpredictable things, and John… John likes this.

‘Tie me up and fuck me,’ Sherlock had said, and it had gone straight to John’s cock even then, in the midst of all the awkwardness and embarassment of their discussion. The thought of Sherlock, physically restrained, wrists reddened from pulling against the bindings, unable to away from whatever John was doing to him--

John swallows. His cock stirs, reacting to the image presented, and John wants Sherlock just like that. Wants him held down and-- but right now, Sherlock is standing in front of him and John hasn’t got the first idea about what there is in Sherlock’s room that could be used to tie Sherlock up or how he'd even manage to get them into Sherlock’s room. And perhaps he needs this to happen here after all, in their kitchen with the light flooding in through the thin curtains and nothing to obscure.

(It’ll be like the first time they did anything like this - in the kitchen, pressed against the counters, only now John doesn’t have to stuff his hand into Sherlock’s pants and jerk him off, and now he can have Sherlock’s mouth for as long as he bloody well wants to. Now he knows what this is to them, and perhaps--)

There’s no time to navigate them into another room or for figuring out practicalities. It's too urgent, all at once.

Without warning, John forcefully jerks his hand down without letting go of Sherlock’s hair. The sound Sherlock lets out as he’s janked down to his knees is the single most satisfying sound John has heard from him in days. Instinctive, unschooled, raw; pain transcribed by vocal cords.

John meets his eyes as Sherlock’s head is forced back so that he’s looking at John, and it shouldn’t be possible to look more naked than Sherlock had done mere minutes ago, but apparently it is.

John’s right thumb is stroking Sherlock’s bottom lip, his left hand still fisted in dark curls.

Outside, the usual sounds of London traffic are drowned out by sirens. Inside, John is pressing his thumb between Sherlock’s lips, pushing his way in until it’s surrounded by wetness and warmth.

It ought to feel alarming, at least a bit, but it doesn’t. None of it does.

John lets Sherlock lick, tongue and suck on the finger in his mouth for several minutes before he pulls it out, lingering just a second on the saliva-wet bottom lip. Using his free hand, John unbuckles his belt and unbuttons his trousers, making Sherlock watch him.

Pushing both trousers and pants down just below his balls, John pauses to give himself a moment. He wants to say something, something crude and Not Good and something he’d never dreamt of saying to anyone else in a situation like this, but the words seem to get stuck in his throat. It’s filthy, but then all of this is; this isn’t about making love or even about having sex, and he wants to say that, to make that very clear with a few chosen words, but even with Sherlock looking like he does right now - eyes less focused, head pulled back, cock fully erect against his bare stomach - John can’t say it.

Sherlock must have had a point about John being repressive when it comes to some of his own urges, and the thought of Sherlock being able to both see and word such things makes John want to hit him.

(Is that what Sherlock wants?)

By his feet, Sherlock is waiting while John fights his own thoughts. His head is angled to the side where John must have been pulling even harder on Sherlock’s hair without realising. Sherlock is waiting, and John is waiting too, but he’s not sure what he’s waiting for. Perhaps for a plan, for an idea on how to go about this now that he knows that he can - but he still doesn’t know, not really, because ‘whatever you want to do to me is fine by me unless I say otherwise’ is not the answer he had needed to hear. He needs to know where the limits are, but Sherlock thinks that limits are like rubberbands and therefore only something to employ in order to annoy others, to snap them in people’s faces.

John wants to do that too sometimes. Wants that very much indeed.

In front of him, Sherlock is waiting. Sherlock never waits, yet here he is, waiting for John to make a move.

John’s move. In this, Sherlock will wait and John will lead.

Letting out a breath, John asks himself where he wants this to lead. The answer, it seems, is simple, and so are the actions needed to achieve what he wants.

(He wants to come. He wants to press into that mouth and--)

With his free hand, John takes his own cock in hand, stroking it a few times. It hardens just a bit more and John’s index finger gets wet from the precome as he strokes. The sensation alone is enough for John refocus, his mind narrowing down to arousal and what to do with it.

His cock is circled by his hand as he pulls Sherlock towards him until the tip of John’s cock is rubbing against Sherlock’s bottom lip in a mirroring of what his thumb had done.

Slowly, firmly. A glans moving over lips where saliva has just dried, spreading another wetness over them. John watching as Sherlock begins to open his mouth to take John’s cock, and he pulls Sherlock’s head back before Sherlock has a chance to do so, looking steadily at him before allowing Sherlock’s head back to where it had been, resuming to drag his cock over Sherlock's lips.

It’s John’s move. And John does move after a few seconds, letting his cock press against Sherlock’s mouth until his lips part, and the pressure that’s been building up in his groin is suddenly too intense to hold back. Sherlock fights to keep his eyes open as John pushes deeper into his mouth, not stopping his slow intrusion until Sherlock is gagging around him and John’s balls are pressed against Sherlock’s chin.

John watches the involuntary tears that well up in Sherlock’s eyes as he tries to swallow. John wipes a few tears off with his thumb before he pulls almost all the way out again.

“You really do like this,” John says, his thumb now stroking over Sherlock’s cheekbone where wet trails still lingers, looking down Sherlock’s body, noting that Sherlock is just as hard as he’d been before he'd choked on John’s cock. “You can jerk yourself off if you need to, seeing how you get off on this. I won’t mind.”

Sherlock’s eyes flutter briefly, and there’s a low rumble that suddenly surrounds John’s cock. It takes two seconds before Sherlock regains enough control to stop himself from making any sound. It’s impossible, John thinks, to tell if the flush on Sherlock’s cheeks is deepening further, but something tells him that it is. His own cheeks are burning, but it’s not from shame over what he’s just said. Sherlock’s reaction had been too distracting for John to reflect on his reactions to the words.

“Oh,” he just says, slowly and knowingly, letting Sherlock understand just how much John’s observed in this moment.

Seeing Sherlock like this is enough to make the surge in John's groin to become almost too much, and without giving it another thought, John pushes himself further into Sherlock’s mouth, splaying the fingers of his right hand at the back of Sherlock’s head to hold him still as John moves, finally moves, deeper into his mouth.

John shuts his eyes, unable to focus on anything but the sensation of friction, wetness, sucking and on the way Sherlock’s throat muscles spasms over and over again, Sherlock still unable to take all of John’s cock without gagging. After a minute, John forces himself to open his eyes, just long enough to see that Sherlock’s hand is moving over his own cock roughly and uncoordinated, and that saliva is running from Sherlock’s mouth, tears from his eyes and--

He shuts his eyes again, his thrusts becoming more shallow and frantic as he feels the first signs of his orgasm approaching, the tension almost painful before he tips over the edge, shouting, pushing Sherlock’s head to his groin and fucking his throat until oversensitivity sets in. Slowly, he lets go of Sherlock’s head, slipping out of his mouth and feeling the cooler air of the room against his wet cock, shivering.

Steadying himself with a hand on the counter closest to him, he breathes hard, watching Sherlock’s face scrunch up as he sways for a second after John has backed away, then regaining his balance with a hand on the edge of the table while he continue to work himself with a frenzy John has never seen before. He looks desperate, there on his own on the floor, and John pushes himself away from the counter, moves towards Sherlock and lets his hand resume its grip on his hair, and Sherlock leans his head back and comes just seconds later, John’s hand still holding him.

Sherlock slumps down until he’s sitting on the floor, his hand sticky with come and his eyes still shut. John lets go of him, letting him slip down further to the floor. And John wants to leave, wants to wipe himself off and to get his trousers back up and to just be alone for a few minutes, but before he’s even begun to turn around, he finds himself stopping. Instead of walking away from the mess he’s left on Sherlock, he finds himself leaning in, tasting it.

Sherlock’s mouth, when it opens to his, tastes slightly bitter from the semen and his lips are still a bit salty even as the tears must have dried in the warmth of their kitchen. John leans in further, leans in until Sherlock has to lean back on his elbows to prevent himself from falling back onto the floor, and then John’s hands are on the back of his head, protecting it as Sherlock does indeed end up on his back on the floor.

It feels surreal, far more than the sex, to find himself being entangled with Sherlock Holmes on their kitchen floor.

The post-orgasmic heaviness makes the kisses slow, unhurried, but whenever John forgets himself and the kisses become more fleeting and light, Sherlock presses back, reminding him to put just a bit more pressure into it. If he hadn’t been so sated and tired, John might have smiled at this, but he is indeed very sated and rather uncomfortable on the floor even where he’s pressed against Sherlock, who has far too sharp hipbones, so he doesn’t. Instead, he’s trying very hard to ignore the fact that Sherlock’s hand has come to rest upon his back and that his shirt is therefore now sticky and wet from semen. Instead, John focuses on licking into the mouth beneath his own.

They will need to talk about this some day soon, really talk about the limits of what they do and not just conclude things without any explanation or discussion, but John finds that he can’t really be arsed to think about it at this very moment.

Talking is not what they do best, after all. Actions, on the other hand, seem to communicate far more useful information.

Beneath him, Sherlock lets his head fall back fully onto the floor, looking up at John as his fingers move deliberately over John’s shoulder, probably feeling the scar tissue through the fabric of John’s shirt. Even though he tries very hard not to, John finds himself answering the hesitant half-smile on Sherlock’s face as fingers keep trailing curiously over damaged skin, having been granted permission without the question being voiced.

It’s what they do, after all.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Autism spectrum disorder criteria:  
> For this chapter, the following criteria (from the DSM-V) was used:
> 
> “Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.”
> 
> Autism spectrum disorder criteria in this chapter:
> 
> In this chapter, I’d say that the first part, the one about the abnormal social approach, is rather clear. There are not many things about how Sherlock handles this conversation (or, in last chapter, initiates it) that are close to some kind of norm. I think that this part is evident in the show as well, and it’s impossible to say whether it’s a conscious decision or an inability to manage a ‘normal’ approach. In my headcanon, it’s both. It’s a partly a conscious decision, but the decision is based on the notion that if you’re not even trying, you can’t be said to having failed at it. It could also be said that John does not have the most typical social approach either, not in this conversation, and not in canon while interacting with Sherlock, but he displays a much more typical (but not fully) approach when he’s putting his mind to it and is around others than Sherlock.
> 
> Failure of normal back-and-forth conversation is also evident in this chapter. Sherlock will say what he thinks is necessary, and then he fails to see how the conversation is still not over. He will interrupt John at several points, because he already know how John’s sentence is going to end, and either he’s not inclined to hear it, or he fails to see the point of letting John finish when both of them know what he’s going to say. This too is seen often in canon, for example when Sherlock shift topic in the middle of conversations because he’s just had another thought that needs his attention, or when the conversation bores him, so he leaves it.
> 
> Reduced sharing of interests, emotions or affects; I’d say that this part is the least obvious one in this chapter, as Sherlock is indeed interested in the topic of conversation, albeit not comfortable with it. The reduced sharing of emotions and affects can be seen though; Sherlock does not want to give his emotions away, not does he seem to adapt his behaviour as John’s emotions change. This goes for John as well. He’s more reactive and adapts his responses more to Sherlock’s shifts, but he’s reluctant to share his emotions. This is a difficult conversation for both of them, and neither of them are keen on actually sharing (difficult) emotions with each other in canon, and especially not in this story.
> 
> Finally, the failure to initiate and respond to social interactions. Sherlock does not initiate much at all here. He responds somewhat (more than I thought he would when I began writing this scene) to social interaction here, but part of that might be due to the fact that he decided for an approach/persona for this conversation in the last chapter, and is still attempting to hold on to that, since he has a goal; making John be less ashamed of what they’re doing sexually, so that they can continue doing it. One could argue that this whole conversation is in part about him not wanting/being able to respond to certain social interactions, especially during sex, something that John picks up on. I’m not saying that that’s the reason that Sherlock desires to be the submissive partner during sex, but I would agree with John’s reflection here; it helps him. He does not want to initiate, and he does not want to respond in this. Partially, it’s due to him actually having that sexual preference, but I think (in my headcanon of this story) that perhaps that part of it is due his brain wants to get a break from the constant effort that he has to put into social interactions and reading of social cues. He would likely find it to be somewhat hard to focus if he felt the need to constantly assess John, John’s reactions, John’s pleasure and so on during sex. It would likely be far more overwhelming - mentally - to him than the anticipation and the unpredictableness of what they’re doing here.
> 
> Another note on social reciprocity;  
> I think what might also happen in this chapter is a sort of shift, where John is now actually paying attention to Sherlock’s motivations, fears and needs. Previously in this story, it’s been a matter of self-protection to read Sherlock’s expressions and understand where he’s coming from in this. Now, John is actually feeling secure enough to look at Sherlock as his friend once more, actually seeing him instead of using all his energy to make sure that Sherlock doesn’t see through him.


	12. Executive Dysfunction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a day off and had planned to write on another WIP.
> 
> Therefore, I wrote 4000 words on this one instead, because that's how things goes when one makes plans.
> 
> Here; have some executive dysfunction and some... almost not dysfunctional porn.
> 
> (I wasn't allowed to write any longer in the end note (this is not a usual problem), so I haven't managed to fit in all the manifestations of the executive dysfunctions - feel free to add any you see in the notes. Ehm... I will be less verbose next time.)

 

 

The downside with solving cases for the Yard is this; the paperwork.

John is sitting there by Lestrade’s desk, his brow furrowed in concentration as he reads through their statements. It’s mostly John’s statement, really, because John’s learned what details he needs to scribble down in his notebook directly after something happens, knowing that Sherlock won’t be bothered to recall those details later on and knowing that Lestrade will need them for his reports. Ever the medical man, John is used to look at the clock as soon as anything of relevance happens, recording the time in the charts, and it’s one of the reasons that John is more than a gun and a conductor of Sherlock’s light; he is also the order.

Sherlock, although his methods are nothing but strictly orderly, is the chaos of their partnership, and John has become the order of it. It’s strange to consider, because Sherlock prides himself with being logical, structured and straight to the point, but even he is aware that it’s only down to the act of compensation. While his reasoning is perfectly sound and structured, the mechanisms behind his conclusions are far more divergent and instinctive. The logic behind what he knows emerges seconds after the realisations, not the other way around.

“Sherlock?”

It’s John’s voice, and Sherlock flicks his eyes over to him.

“What?” Sherlock drawls, because he has no idea what John had been asking him, and it’s no point in trying to pretend that he’d been paying attention. It is, after all, not his job to pay attention to the boring aftermaths of cases, no matter what Lestrade says.

“Before I got into the room, did Ms Bigun threaten you?” John says, over-articulating, his patience clearly wearing thin.

“Yes,” Sherlock concedes, his gaze returning to his phone.

“How?”

“Hm?”

“How. Did. She. Threaten. You?”

“Said she wouldn’t hesitate to use the knife she was pointing at me if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.”

“So clearly, she had a good motive,” Lestrade mumbles under his breath on the other side of the desk, not stopping for a moment in his typing on the keyboard.

John sniggers slightly, and Sherlock ignores it, leaving them to their usual game of pretending that Sherlock doesn’t understand when he’s being made fun of.

A lifetime of having been made fun of does teach you to recognise when it happens, but there’s no point in calling their attention to this fact. It’s easier to pretend it’s like the solar system - irrelevant.

“Alright, I think I’m done with this one,” John says, handing the third statement of the day over to Lestrade.

“Only two more to go, then,” Lestrade smirks in his exasperated way.

Clearing up the long neglected paperwork of five finished cases had been Lestrade’s ultimatum for letting any of them come anywhere near an investigation again. Every time this happens, Sherlock contemplates only taking cases from the blogs again. Less tedious paperwork.

Scrolling on his phone, it’s clear to see that no cases that could even pass as ‘less dull’ were to be found on Sherlock’s own blog. Clearly, Sherlock will have to go through John’s emails again. There’s a new password, but Sherlock has already picked up that it has thirteen letters in it, and it shouldn’t be imp--

Suddenly, there’s a pull on his phone, and Sherlock holds on harder as John tries to pull the phone away from him.

“What are you doing?” Sherlock snaps, failing to keep all the frustrated energy from the past two hours out of his voice.

He hates every single minute of this, tedium crawling underneath his skin as the sound of the air vent grows louder and louder in the relative silence of the room, paper after paper after--

“Look,” John says, his voice deceptively calm, “either you answer the questions I’m asking you so that I can fill out both my own statement and yours, which we’ve already established is in fact illegal, by the way, or I’ll leave this office right now, and you will have to do it on your own, or there’ll be no cases.”

“As if. You want cases as much as I do.”

“I do, but I’m also far, far more patient than you are. But not patient enough for this, so either put that phone away, or--”

Sherlock slams his phone onto Lestrade’s desk, vincing as he realises that the sound he hears might be that of a screen cracking.

Fighting an impulse to just storm out of this dull, hateful office and Lestrade and John and all their tedious, meaningless ‘musts’ and ‘have tos’, slamming the door behind him and doing anything - anything - to make his mind feel awake again, Sherlock bites his teeth together, letting his hand slide down to the side of his leg and pinches the flesh there, hard. He won’t look at his phone, because doing so would mean admitting that he hadn’t intended to smash his own phone. He’d rather be overly dramatic than careless, after all.

The pain helps. Sherlock remains seated, Lestrade looking at him with wide eyes before shaking his head slightly, returning his eyes to his computer.

It takes another pinch not to shout abuse at Lestrade and tell him that he can keep his condescending looks to himself, and if he doesn’t want Sherlock’s help on any more cases, well then Sherlock won’t insist and--

A third pinch, and Sherlock snaps out of it, breathes deliberately slow while his frustration eases a fraction. Besides him, John has returned to statement number four.

 

*

 

“Tell me why I’m putting up with this again,” John says grimly as they leave Lestrade’s office 45 minutes later. 

Sherlock feels like his own brain has been filled with heavy, wet sand from all the mind numbing hours in the crowded office. John looks like his brain has been filled with something more explosive, and suddenly, Sherlock wants to light a match close to all that restrained explosiveness, because at least that wouldn’t be boring. At least then he wouldn’t have to feel like he was falling asleep standing up. There are few things as hateful as this heavy, gluey feeling in his mind. There’s a reason he won’t pay bills or write statements or go to the store. And it’s a very good one, at that. 

He can’t think like this.

John ignores him as they make their way out of the Yard, and Sherlock manages to get them a cab. Sherlock spends the cab ride thinking of coffee, but he’s already had three cups at the Yard, and it hadn’t helped in the least. A cigarette. A line. A-- 

Sherlock bites his lip.

There’s a cigarette pack in one of his dressing gown pockets. While there are also blue pills left in the pack John’s never once touched himself (Sherlock should remember to replace the ones that are now missing, he really needs to--) that would dull the surging feeling of unease inside his whole body, Sherlock doesn’t want to dull anything right now. He just wants the sharpness back, wants the clarity of a hit and the alertness of--

The cab pulls over to the sidewalk outside 221. John gets out as soon as the cab stops, leaving Sherlock to pay.

Throwing approximately the right amount into the hands of the cabby, Sherlock can almost feel the smoke fill his lungs, and he hates the way he feels unsteady as he takes the stairs two at a time.

John is already in the kitchen, and Sherlock makes his way into his room, feeling the frustration radiating from his friend in a way that does nothing to help his own pathetic desperation for anything that will make his mind feel less like the overly cluttered and stuffy flat of a suspect where he once spent five hours searching for a flash drive. Sherlock hated the flat and he’d hated the way he almost couldn’t breathe at the end.

His fingers closing around the cigarettes, Sherlock feels his body relax just a bit, and he shoves them into his trouser pocket before making his way out to the living room, pushing the window open and cursing silently as it takes a firm pull to manage to open the last bit.

“Give them over.”

Sherlock turns around to face John, who holds his hand out, clearly expecting to be handed the cigarettes. Raising his eyebrows slightly, Sherlock turns back to the window and gets his left hand on the fire escape ladder before John’s hand grips his right arm.

“No, you don’t.”

“Watch. Me.”

Pulling his arm free, Sherlock leans out and gets his foot up on the window sill. Before he’s managed to get his other foot up, Sherlock can hear John walk away from the window with brisk, angry steps.

It shouldn’t matter. It’s not like they don’t fight all the time.

The heavy feeling in Sherlock’s head is now matched with a similar feeling in his gut, but he shakes it off as he reach the roof.

As he lights the first cigarette and takes a deep drag, the calm of knowing that the chemicals will hit his system any second is already present, making him feel like he’s exhaled at least a bit of all that wet sand in his mind instead of having inhaled tar.

It’s inadequate, Sherlock thinks as he eyes his second - or is it the third? - cigarette. The frustration is still there, and it shouldn’t be as strong as it is, but something about John acting like Sherlock’s a spoiled child when he refuses to partake in inane activities or when Sherlock uses what methods he has in order to make his mind work always puts Sherlock on edge, because while he likes to think about it as ‘defiance’ against boredom, Sherlock knows that it’s… more than that. And any inability, no matter how mundane the subject of it might be, is something that should be kept firmly away from anyone else. The inability to make his mind perform tasks so simple that even Anderson manages to do them on a regular basis is nothing but shameful if it’s seen as just that; inability. Most of the time, Sherlock simply thinks of it as something that will soil his mind if he was to engage in these mindless tasks, because they are mindless, and he has far more important things to do with his extraordinary mind, but just the knowledge that he most often  _ can’t _ make himself perform them, or can’t sustain enough attention to finish them, is enough to make shame burn in his cheeks.

‘You might be smart, Mr Holmes, but you are also far too lazy and too spoiled to ever put it to any real use,’ his teacher had said once as she’d lost her patience with him.

He isn’t lazy, and he isn’t spoiled. He’s shown everyone what he can do when he puts his mind to it. He’s lived on the streets, been undercover and worked his arse off as part of his cover. She was wrong, and he was right, and after all; who’s made a life for themselves, she or him? He’s the world’s only consulting detective, and what is she?

“Sherlock?”

The sound of John’s voice from the living room window is almost drowned out by the traffic below, and Sherlock considers pretending like he hasn’t heard, but the nicotine has calmed his head enough for him to realise that it wouldn’t matter if he ignored John. It would most likely only end with John coming up here, and Sherlock doesn’t particularly want that.

“John.” Sherlock answers in a deadpan way that he knows makes John roll his eyes.

“Mrs Hudson wants to know if you can reprogram her telly. She managed to reset the settings, I think.”

With a sigh, Sherlock tries not to feel relief over the fact that John’s voice bears no signs of irritation any longer and that they’re clearly not going to talk about any of it. As he climbs down the ladder and gets his feet on the window sill, John has already left the living room, and Mrs Hudson stands with her remote in her hand, holding back a scold over the way Sherlock uses the roof for smoking, filling the whole building’s ventilation system with cigarette smoke.

Without a word, he grabs the remote from her and she follows behind him as he makes his way down to 221A.

 

*

 

The flat is silent as Sherlock returns half an hour later, after having fixed the television and ingested at least half a plate of ginger snaps as he listened to one of Mrs Hudson’s stories, distractedly reading through her day-old newspaper as she talked.

As Sherlock looks into the kitchen, he finds John sitting by the table by the wall, sorting through the tools of his toolbox, apparently looking for something.

“Ah, did you get it to work? She always asks me, but I figured you might as well do it as we both know that I’ll only end up saying things to that damned telly that she will tut over later,” John mutters.

“Yes,” Sherlock simply says, lifting up a screwdriver to examine the rust pattern more closely.

There’s a silence, and John closes the toolbox.

“Do you want me to ask you first?”

John’s question indicates a clear change of subject, and for a moment, Sherlock isn’t sure what to make of it. John’s lets his gaze dart over Sherlock, intently, and it doesn’t take any more for Sherlock to understand. He swallows, thinking.

“No,” he says, but it’s not a definitive, and he sees that John understands as much.

“Not asking,” John ponders. “Not asking, but making my intentions clear?”

“Acceptable,” Sherlock allows.

“And you?”

“No.”

“How will I--”

“I will answer you. No.”

John’s breath is even, but his pulse picks up and the superficial blood vessels in his face dilates as he continues to speak.

“Is that your answer for now?”

Sherlock’s breath picks up, but his reply still sounds firm.

“No.”

 

*

 

The kiss is firm, decisive.

Sherlock feels his own shudder being answered by John’s body, their lips parting and John’s tongue making contact with his.

It’s unlike most of the kisses they’ve shared previously, and there’s something unsettling about it, about the way that it isn’t quite clear what John expect out of this. Is Sherlock expected to… contribute in any significant way in terms of the proceedings of this? A soft push and pull between them, moving this forward?

The movements of John’s lips feels intrusive in all the wrong ways as Sherlock attempts to evaluate the situation, trying to grasp what this is supposed to--

The sharp pinch on his nipple - a pinch that is similar to those Sherlock had inflicted on himself mere hours ago, but the pain feels different when it's out of his control - and there's a gasp escaping almost before Sherlock's brain has registered the pain. The sounds that follows as the pain continues, fingers rubbing roughly over the aching skin, are even more telling.

Sherlock wants to bite every single one of those sounds back. 

John, on the other hand, breaks the kiss, a partly unfamiliar smile on his face. No; not unfamiliar. Sherlock’s seen it before, has seen it on John's face before, only never in this flat. It’s the look of John, having done something he knows to be more than a bit not good, but which he has no scruples whatsoever about doing - and enjoying - anyway. It’s a look that Sherlock’s glimpsed on cases, when they’ve overstepped even their own bounderies, or when a suspect that John’s found to be particularly despicable ended up with a few more bruises than what had been strictly necessary to incapacitate them.

Like this, John looks like a crime about to happen, Sherlock thinks, and the contrast to the kiss that had preceded the look is… telling.

“So this is what it takes, then.” John’s fingers are no longer rubbing, but still stroking firmly over Sherlock’s nipple, and the pain is renewed for each stroke, but it’s a ghost of the initial pain. Then the fingers still, tugs a bit at the skin.

Without specifying any further what he means, John’s fingers twists. The resulting cry of pain and the way Sherlock instinctively tries to back away, to get his arms between them, seem to amuse John, who simply catches Sherlock’s wrist, holding it still. The sensation almost overrides the pain. 

(The resulting rush of neurotransmitters is… remarkable.)

John’s eyebrows raise.

“Upstairs. Undress. Now.”

 

*

 

It’s easier getting undressed without John watching, but standing naked on the floor of John’s bedroom, Sherlock almost wishes that John had been there, because there’s no dignified way to wait naked for someone. He could get on the bed, he could even get into the bed, but the whole idea seems… presumptuous. And the thought of lying underneath the covers in someone else’s bed, alone, somehow manages to make him feel even more exposed than he already is, so he remains standing, waiting.

When John comes in a minute later, Sherlock turns to face him.

John moves towards the bed, sitting down on it before he turns his eyes to Sherlock. Eyes drifting over him, Sherlock straightens his back slightly, locking eyes with John.

“Come here,” John says nodding at Sherlock to come closer.

As Sherlock comes close enough for John to reach him, John just nods again, looking pointedly at the floor. 

It probably should be a disappointment rather than a relief to almost any man to be asked to kneel in front of someone instead of remain standing where your cock is almost at the perfect height for someone else’s mouth, but it isn’t. It simply isn’t who they are - at least not who they’ve been so far - and Sherlock can read the momentarily confusion as John is faced with a half-erect penis while a tall man looms over him, and it’s not something Sherlock finds that he wants to expend on. On his knees, he can feel the rough carpet against his shins and let his eyes follow John as John tilts his head towards him.

Leaning his own head back, Sherlock seeks John’s lips, and he’s just an inch from reaching them. They share a few breaths before John leans down to kiss him.

His hands come up at their own accord, searching for something to hold on to. They find their way onto John’s thighs, feeling the firm muscle underneath the cotton of his trousers, palms flat against the warmth as John sucks at his lips. The kiss remains softer than Sherlock would normally have liked, but like this, naked, with his head bent down and his mouth pried open by John’s tongue while hands find their way to the back of his head, cradling it, Sherlock finds himself feeling grounded enough to just let it happen to him.

It’s almost like being able to let go of the top layer of his thoughts; to become part of what happens without also simultaneously being the observer.

It feels almost like being safe, to feel this apart from everything that usually dwells in his mind.

After what feels like minutes, Sherlock finds his hands being pulled away from John’s legs, pushed back to rest against his own sides, and John breaks the contact, moves behind Sherlock, bringing Sherlock’s hands together, and--

_ Oh _ .

‘Tie me up,’ Sherlock had said two days ago, and now John’s hand is holding Sherlock’s wrists in a very firm grip as rope tightens around them. The rope is neither rough nor smooth, and it slides against Sherlock’s skin in a way that makes him want to pull against it just to feel the resistance.

It is, in short, marvellous.

John pulls on the ties, testing it. The heat that spreads all the way up his arms makes Sherlock inhale a bit sharper, biting back any further reactions. Satisfied, John gets to his feet, his fingers sliding along Sherlock’s arm in a mirror of the sensations that ran through them just seconds ago. 

The shiver is inevitable.

Returning to the bedside, John remains standing as he unbuttons his trousers, pushing them down to his knees together with his pants before sitting down on the edge of the bed once more. His cock is almost fully hard, and Sherlock can feel the slight smell of it, but it’s not as invasive as it usually is. Sherlock follows John’s gaze, sees the moment John realises that Sherlock’s own cock is now straining up against his stomach, twitching a bit at the look that John gives him.

Sherlock knows what he is, but it’s not until he meets John’s eyes that he knows for certain that John understands to which extent Sherlock is what he is.

John’s mouth opens for a second, then closes. 

Taking it all in doesn’t make John leave. Instead, it makes him pull Sherlock down by the nape until Sherlock’s mouth opens to take John’s cock. The grip on the back of his neck and the pull of the rope around his wrists makes smell and hair irrelevant, distant facts that has nothing to do with the sensation of sucking the cock in front of him, hearing bitten off curses as his mouth slides further down.

When John pulls him off, Sherlock’s jaw aches slightly, and his knees burn a bit from the carpet underneath. John’s fingers stroke over his cheekbone, almost tenderly.

John gets up, undresses efficiently, and when he bends Sherlock over the bed, his knees still against the carpet, Sherlock knows that what will happen, but even with the memory of last time lingering somewhere in the back of his mind, the idea is almost appealing. 

‘Tie me up and fuck me,’ Sherlock had said, and it’s what’s about to happen, because a cold, slick finger is circling his anus, another hand resting heavily against the small of Sherlock’s back as if to keep him from jerking away from the touch.

Before long, the hand moves up to his hair, the pull of it making Sherlock arch his neck back just as a second finger breeches him, the two points of pain merging into a string of sensation along his spine.

It’s nothing like the previous time, and instead of forcing himself to simply take the discomfort, Sherlock is riding the sensations of pain, submission and the intrusion into his body as a third finger joins the other two. At least he thinks that’s what happens, but the sensory input is in somewhat of a jumble, and it’s hard to draw any conclusions as he notices that he’s rocking back against the fingers, pushing against them.

Behind him, John’s fingers slides out of him as his grip on Sherlock’s hair releases. A hand on Sherlock’s hip, a firm hold, then the nudge of something that’s not fingers against Sherlock’s arsehole, pushing.

It burns, but John’s left hand joins the right, gripping Sherlock’s hips hard, pressing him against the edge of the bed, and Sherlock’s cock is trapped painfully at an uncomfortable angle, but as John presses further in, the sensation of almost bursting overrides all others.

He’s making sounds, and he’s not stopping them. From what he can make out of the curses behind him, John does not seem to mind the sounds of distress mixed with… something that’s frustratingly similar to abandon.

A harsh pull backwards, and Sherlock’s cock is no longer pressed against the edge of the bed, then John pulls almost all the way out before pushing in again, and Sherlock is pressed back against the hard edge of the mattress.

The initial pain gives way to something far more complex, and then he’s pressed more firmly against upwards, so that his upper body is once again resting fully against the top of the bed, and there’s finally friction against his cock, and it’s almost…

...almost too much and too intense.

But his hands are still tied behind his back, and he pulls against the rope, and it doesn’t give, and the surge that runs through his nerves at that makes everything else fade for a while, until Sherlock realises that he’s close, close to coming, his hips jerking as good as they can with John’s grip still painfully hard.

John slows down then, breathing heavily, rapidly behind him for a few seconds before he pushes in forcefully again, and the slide of Sherlock’s own cock against the mattress is--

Sherlock comes, feeling every convulsion of his internal muscles around John, the orgasm longer than usually and almost uncomfortably intense, but it merges with the pain around his now slightly raw wrists and the fingers digging into his skin, and it’s--

Sherlock’s head slumps down against the covers, his lungs desperate for more air. 

John’s still moving inside him, and it makes Sherlock feel like he needs to come once more, but he can’t, so the pressure instead becomes something he wants to pull away from, but then John stills, and Sherlock can feel an increase of heat inside of him, the slow rocking of his body slowing down.

The sounds John makes are nothing like the sounds that Sherlock’s heard himself release just moments ago. They are less desperate, more grunting and bitten back as John slumps against Sherlock’s back, letting out a long breath.

A minute later, John gets up on shaky legs, pulling out of Sherlock. The twinge is sharp in the midst of the haze of neurochemicals, and Sherlock becomes aware that his arms aches where they’ve been pressed against his back from the weight of John’s body.

From behind him, Sherlock can hear a low chuckle, John’s voice hoarse and his hand finding Sherlock’s bound ones, stroking up the muscles of his arms.

  
Inside Sherlock’s head, things remain almost-quiet for eight more minutes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Executive dysfunction according to Wikipedia:
> 
> Executive functioning is a theoretical construct representing a domain of cognitive processes that regulate, control, and manage other cognitive processes. Executive functioning is not a unitary concept; it is a broad description of the set of processes involved in certain areas of cognitive and behavioural control. Executive processes are integral to higher brain function, particularly in the areas of goal formation, planning, goal-directed action, self-monitoring, attention, response inhibition, and coordination of complex cognition and motor control for effective performance. 
> 
> ****
> 
> Executive dysfunction in this chapter:  
> I've decided to use this very short summary as a structure for my notes in this chapter:
> 
> Action - monitoring and self-regulating actions  
> Working memory -   
> Emotions - managing frustrations and modulating emotions  
> Effort - regulating alertness, sustained effort and speed   
> Focus - focusing, sustaining and shifting attention  
> Activation - organising, prioritising and activating to work
> 
> Also; I've based most of the executive dysfunctions in this chapter based on how they most commonly presents in ADHD, due to me finding it most in character with Sherlock. There are, however, several ways that these dysfunctions might manifest, so take it for what it is; a mainly ADHD-based illustration of the phenomenon.
> 
> So, onto how it might manifest in Sherlock (minus the things that I didn't have room for in this note):
> 
> Emotions - Sherlock almost loses his temper several times in Lestrade’s office, and can’t manage his frustration during tasks that are tearing on his patience the way most tasks that require executive functions will do. Losing his temper in these situation might have a short term reward at times, because he’ll temporarily be freed from some demands, but in the long run, the consequences will be negative for him if even Lestrade won’t work with him. Also; he needs a new phone.
> 
> Focus - Sherlock’s not even trying to keep his focus, deeming the matter to be exceedingly dull, but even if he had attempted to do so, I think that this version of him hadn’t been able to, and that not trying in this case might be a bit of a defense mechanism - if you don’t care, you can’t fail. Sherlock’s having clear problems both in canon and in this story to sustain his focus and attention on anything that he doesn’t find interesting or relevant to his interests, and in my head, the reason he doesn’t even try to is the same reason as the one stated above; he knows he can’t. He used to try, but he never managed, and when he tried, it drained him of his energy. 
> 
> Actions: Sherlock fails to self-regulate as he slams his own phone down onto Lestrade’s desk, hence breaking the screen. I think that normally, he wouldn’t be so careless, but after having sat through hours of something that’s boring enough to almost corrode on his brain, he won’t have the self-regulation needed to make sure that his phone doesn’t hit the desk too hard. It’s a common problem for almost everyone with executive problems; impulsivity in combination with poor self-regulation. It has consequences.
> 
> Effort - Throughout the whole time at the Yard, Sherlock feels like his brain is heavy and slow, the way you feel when you’re about to sleep. It’s common, especially in the ADHD spectrum of executive dysfunction, that the individual has a hard time regulating alertness and wakefulness, and one of the strongest theories about this is due to a dopamine deficiency in the brains of those with ADHD. Dopamine isn’t just responsible for our reward system (the thing that makes winning a game feel good or makes us feel content after finishing a task), which is also said to be impaired in those with ADHD (which makes it so that they need stronger stimuli in order to activate the reward system) but also plays an important role in regulating the level of alertness in our brains. In short, some researchers believe that a lot of the symptoms we see of ADHD is due to the brain constantly being on the verge of falling asleep, and the fidgeting, restlessness, daydreaming and so on are different coping mechanisms to keep awake. It would also explain part of the impulsivity and the impairment in emotional regulation, as anyone who’s been really, really tired can certainly testify to.   
> Just like many others with executive dysfunction, Sherlock self-medicates. Coffee, sugar, nicotine, adrenaline… all these are things that will keep the brain awake for a short duration of time. So are cocaine and amphetamines, and a common hypothesis is that this is one of the main reasons behind the very high comorbidity between ADHD and substance abuse, and also why ADHD medications which contains very low doses of amphetamine or substances which work in a similar way as amphetamine works.


	13. Borderline PD criteria, part III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for several internalised -phobias.
> 
> And for other things internalised, I might add.

 

 

It’s 7am on a Tuesday, and John is heading towards the A&E at Barts for a nine hour shift.

John checks the time on his phone as he crosses the street, thankful for the slow morning traffic. Baker Street tube station will be filled with people already, but the streets around the flat are still languid. He’s on time, and that’s all that matters. John is not the type who turns up late to a shift. Not unless there’s been a murder, of course.

The cool taste of mint from his toothpaste and the scent of his shower gel mingles with the air outside, and he feels clean, scrubbed, decent. Whatever was last night is left in the flat - is left in John’s bed - while he’s on his way to work, and he can separate those realities when he needs to. Tangled, too-warm sheets, naked skin covered by a thin layer of perspiration pressed against his shin and a rope discarded on the floor on one side of the bed is now being traded for clean scrubs, efficiency and the smell of disinfectant.

Sherlock isn’t the only one who can compartmentalise, John thinks as he blips his Oyster card and joins the line of people heading towards the escalator.

When John’s alarm went off at 6.15 am, Sherlock had still been in John’s bed. At first, the reality of it hadn’t registered. There’d only been desperate fumbling in order to quickly silence the alarm, because that’s what you do when you realise that someone is sleeping next to you and your alarm threatens to wake them up at the break of day. It had taken several moments of silence after the bloody alarm had finally been muted before John’s sleep-drunken brain had finally taken in the fact that the person next to him in his slightly moist, overly warm bed was Sherlock. A naked, sleeping Sherlock. At that point, Sherlock had been stirring and twisting, and John had held his breath, intensely wishing for Sherlock to go back to sleep. After a few seconds, Sherlock had turned to his left side, knees drawn up, and it had seemed like he was actually still asleep. John had waited three minutes before getting up, making sure to climb out of his bed as carefully as possible before grabbing his clothes and his phone and heading downstairs.

John had gone through his usual pre-morning shift routine just a bit faster than usual due to the three minutes delay upon waking up. Eating an apple while turning on the shower, shaving quickly as he felt the coffee kick in. He didn’t think about falling asleep with Sherlock, because it was morning, and his brain wasn’t quite awake yet. It’s a blessed form of ignorance; being aware but not feeling it. John likes early mornings, because they offer a routine and a single-minded focus. 

As John settles on a free seat on the tube, his thoughts wanders for a moment before they get stuck on the fact that the act of actually sleeping together - as opposed to the more euphemistic ‘sleeping together’ - signifies something that can’t be explained simply by neurochemical reactions due to sexual stimuli. Sleeping together is not impulsive. Sleeping together is ‘staying’, an active choice. Sleeping together is… real.

It might be the too strong coffee he had just 10 minutes ago, but John feels his heart beats grow more prominent in his chest, the palpations making him uncomfortable.

Here he is, on a tube a Tuesday morning, on his way to his work as a doctor at one of London’s hospitals. He’s a former captain of the RAMC, a brother, a son, a flatmate, a tenant, a friend, a-- 

And. He’s a man, sleeping with another man. In every sense of that word.

With a thin smile to his own reflection in the window of the tube car, John thinks that it ought to feel stranger to consider this. But the morning haze is still surrounding him, everything is still routine and John finds comfort in these routines, finds comfort in having a purpose that requires him to get up at dawn and make his way across London to do his job. It makes everything else seem like a parenthesis at times.

Last night. Last night he’d done what Sherlock had asked him to do a few days prior. He’d tied his best friend up and fucked him. Having Sherlock there, over the bed, his hands restrained and his arse exposed, his attempts to bite back sounds failing and his eyes lacking the usual crystalline clarity, was-- 

John takes a deep breath, because the way his body reacts to that memory is more than a bit disconcerting. 

It’s strange to consider that mere weeks ago, the thought of doing what he’d done last night would have been too much to stomach. Even now, when he thinks about certain aspects of it in detail, John finds that he’s unsettled by parts of it. Not just the idea of it - the idea of fucking a man - but the actual logistics of it - touching another man’s cock, the smell of another person’s semen on his sheets, the springy hair around the navel that trails down to… - is still somewhat objectionable.

The tube car stops at the next station, and around John, people are pressing closer together to allow more passengers on. It’s a bit suffocating, or perhaps it’s his thoughts that are.

A few weeks back, John had been bothered by the fact that he was instigating a romantic experiment (too soon to call it anything else) with someone he wasn’t sexually attracted to. It had been pathetic, being so afraid to be thrown out of someone’s life that you’d been willing to ignore your own sexuality - one of the few fixed points in John’s identity - just to avoid that. It had been pathetic, and John loathed that feeling, but it was a familiar feeling, one he knew from before. Now, John is buggering Sherlock and getting off on it, and Sherlock isn’t who John thought he was, but the truly disturbing thing about it is that John isn’t who John thought he was either.

John doesn’t fear many things, but he fears these things; being abandoned, being useless and not being sure what he is.

Being straight has been a solid in John’s life, and he thinks it still is, because while he finds that he does enjoy having sex with Sherlock, John isn’t sexually attracted to him the way he is to women. The problem is that from the outside, that distinction doesn’t matter. John is sleeping with a man, therefore John must be…

...something that John does not want to put a label on. Something that John does not want anyone to put a label on, because John hasn’t changed, not in a bit, but to the outside world, that is irrelevant, and John has fought very hard to form an identity, over and over again, and he does not care to have to build another one, especially one that is based on something that isn’t, in fact, the truth about him. John does not have a problem with… queers. John’s sister is queer. Sherlock is most likely queer. John has defended gay people in bar fights, for Heaven’s sake. He’s been this close to hitting a subordinate in the army for saying the most disturbing, homophobic shit one night. No, John isn’t homophobic, no, but he’s also not… gay. Or any variation thereof. And if anyone finds out that he is sleeping with Sherlock, no one else will care about that fact, because everything that John is, everything that John has fought so hard to define and become, will be seen through some kind of rainbow colored lens, and the thought of that makes something akin to panic rise in John’s chest, and he has to clench his fist, dig his nails into his palm, to fight down the urge to hit something.

He’s approaching his stop, and as the the car slows down at the station, John takes one more deep breath and decides to leave all thoughts of this behind on the seat. 

John is a doctor. A patient one, who used to be in the army. He has colleagues that appreciates him, and Eva wants to sleep with him, just as Sherlock had deduced. He will spend nine hours fixing things, using his skills and his training and his qualities in a useful way. He will bicker with Selma, if she’s on this shift as well, and he’ll ask Matthew about that book he talked about a few shifts prior.

Leaving the station, John heads towards one of the things he’s certain of his role in.

His work.

 

*

 

Per usual, the first hours of a morning shift on a weekday is relatively calm at the A&E. The late afternoon rush is distant yet, and the night crowd dissolved hours ago.

John likes the adrenaline and the stress, because it allows him to just be, but at times he finds the calm to be almost as rewarding, having time to talk to the patients and even catch up on his paperwork and charting. There’s something almost surreal with the almost empty waiting room of an A&E, the silence making it feel almost post-apocalyptic.

“Should I take the next one, or are you bored out of your mind yet?” his colleague Darren says, nodding at the admission room as he and John walk down the corridor, past the mostly empty examination rooms.

“Oh, I’m good, I think,” John says. “I’ll let you have that distraction so I don’t use it as a distraction from finishing my charts.”

“Alright, I’ll take one for the administration, then.”

Darren takes off to see the next patient, and John continues down the corridor to one of the ridiculously small rooms they often use to finish up their paperwork.

Taking a seat on the timeworn desk chair, John takes a moment to congratulate himself on the choice he made weeks ago; to leave the locum work behind and find a position at the A&E. While the hours had been very adjustable as a locum doctor, John found that the constant variation and the lack of consistency made him exhausted, because he needed a fixed point in the midst of it all. The A&E was far more chaotic, but here, John was part of a team, part of something bigger, and his new colleagues had been quick to take to him, his role in the group quickly emerging. He was ‘the one who’s been to war’, ‘the solid one’, ‘no-fuss’ and known as a friendly fellow who didn’t need to prove his own superiority by being condescending to nurses or younger doctors. Usually, John found that references to his military career made him uneasy, since everything to do with that time seemed to have happened to someone else. He wasn’t that John Watson, not anymore. It wasn’t only his title and his position that had been trashed by a single bullet. It was all of who he was. But at the A&E, it doesn’t trouble him as much, because it gives him a new role, one that might be built partly on what he’d once been, but that was also all about what he can do now. 

Coming back to London, stripped of his army identity, John had once more been… no one. A patient, at first, then an invalid. It was normal to become depressed after a traumatic injury, John knew, and his therapist kept telling him so, but John also knew that this wasn’t the first time he’d felt that way. It had happened so often; when his family had moved from one town to another when he was nine, when he’d switched schools, when the soccer team had been terminated, when he’d finished med school, when he’d been new at the army…

In short, John had found that he was actually no one until he was part of something else. And while he had a fairly easy time fitting into new constellations and new groups, part of him felt a certain disconcertion at this, because that again was proof that he was… more of a chameleon than an actual person. He’d always thought it was just a matter of age; once he got older he’d get a fixed personality of his own, become accustomed to himself and able to see himself, contours and all, when he looked in the mirror. He’d be someone who enjoyed connections to others, but who moved through life independently, secure in himself.

He’d been wrong.

Sitting in the tiny room with the flaky wallpaper at the A&E at age thirty-seven, John Watson is no more independent or fixed that he’d been at age twenty-one. Between being a doctor at the A&E and being Sherlock Holmes’ blogger, colleague, flatmate, best friend and… more, John Watson is only a joint name and a joint set of skills kept in one body. A few poor habits and some unfortunate personality traits might be attributed to him as well, but not much more. One of the reasons that John had been terrified when Sherlock showed up at his after work had been that there was something going on between them that he hadn’t yet been able to own up to, yes, but perhaps the bigger part of that fear was that it had meant that his two worlds met, collided, and his colleagues doesn’t know Sherlock’s John, and Sherlock doesn’t know the John who worked at the A&E.

In short, John still lacks what he thought age would give him.

A sudden knock on the door pulls John from his indulgent introspection with a slight startle.

“If you’re just going to stare at the wall, you might as well have coffee,” Selma says, her mousy brown riot of a hair bobbing as she sticks her head in.

John looks at the time, realising it must already be noon if Selma’s started her shift.

“Hm, yes. Might as well have coffee while I waste the taxpayers money,” John agrees, gathering up some papers and getting to his feet.

“What’s got you so lost in thought?” Selma asks, twirling the odd dreadlock around her finger while inspecting him as they walk down to the staff room.

“The stress of the morning,” John says, shrugging.

Selma looks around at the still mostly deserted examination rooms and quirks a half-smile. They pass a few doors in silence before reaching the half-open door leading into the staff room. The room is mostly empty, only two tables are occupied, and Selma heads straight to the coffee machine, fetching two cups.

“My sister’s staying at my flat for the week,” she says, and the tone of her voice makes any clarification of her views on the matter superfluous.

“That bad?”

“Can’t relax for one second with her around. It’s like she’s silently judging me every single time I move.”

“Family’s always a pleasure,” John agrees. “I can’t say I’m too disappointed by the fact that mine lives far away.”

“You’d think that’s better, but then they come staying at your place when they visit you, and suddenly you wish they lived nearby so you could just send them home in the end of the day instead of having to lend your bed to someone who frowns upon the way you clean your bathroom.”

“Well, I guess I’m not as close to my family as you are to yours, then.”

“I envy you,” Selma says, almost inhaling her coffee.

John usually won’t mention his family - not much to mention, with Harry’s being to cross with him to answer his text after their last argument two months ago and his mother and father-- no. He doesn’t want to think about it. 

He’s made something of himself despite his parents, not because of them. They have no part in his life, in who he is.

(He just wishes he knew who he was, but that’s another matter entirely.)

“So they don’t visit?” Selma asks.

“No, not since I got back to London.”

“Bet your charming flatmate makes it easier to keep the parental units away,” Selma says before getting up to refill her coffee cup.

“Well, should it come to that, I’m sure Sherlock would provide me with the perfect excuse not to house them,” John agrees, imagining Sherlock with his Bunsen burner and a very diseased liver, greeting his parents.

“You know, when I first met you I’d imagined that you were the kind of guy who went to visit his parents regularly.”

“How so?” John asks, looking at Selma with a surprised expression.

“I don’t know,” she says, running her finger around the rim of her cup, “I guess you just hit me as this really easygoing, friendly type who liked being liked by others, or something. But then I got to know you a bit more, and then I went to the morgue with you and Sherlock and--”

John laughs, even if something about what she says pokes at something in him.

“Alright, alright, I get the picture. Once again, sorry for that.”

“Once again; don’t be. It was interesting. Your friendship makes my friendships look rather sane.”

John sighs, trying to push down the feeling that her earlier comment had evoked.

“Compared to things involving Sherlock, most things tend to look sane,” he mumbles, making Selma snort.

She has one dimple, and it’s quite prominent when she’s grinning. John finds that he likes making her grin, partly because she looks almost unhinged then. Making certain people smile makes him feel like he’s part of something, something exclusive.

(Making Sherlock smile never fails to make John feel like he’s done something incomparably brilliant.)

“What does that make you, then?” she laughs.

And that’s the tricky part, right there, because John doesn’t know what that makes him. He’s past denying that he’s codependent and taken in by everything that revolves around Sherlock like the Earth revolves around the sun, at least as long as you don’t ask Sherlock.

John has always been drawn to things that are bigger than himself, liked the sense of direction it offers. And Sherlock had been that - is still that - even after John thought that he’d never have any direction or purpose again.

He’s used to being a follower. He’s been through medical school and he’s been in the army. There’s been a number of more than dominant girlfriends. It’s only in his role as a doctor that he’s a leader, but he’s still always one in the group, something that used to make his fellow doctors a bit suspicious at first, but that seems to be more accepted these days.

Apparently, his failure to come up with a quick comeback makes Selma sense something, because she frowns.

“I didn’t mean--”

“No, I just got a bit lost in thought,” John says, smiling.

“Is it a sore subject?”

Her gaze is curious rather than empathetic.

“No, it just made me think of a few things,” John finds himself saying with an honesty that surprises himself. 

He’s not one to habitually talk about his thoughts or his problems. Quite the opposite, to be honest, but there’s something disarming about his younger colleague, and he’s tired of having his thoughts locked up in his head, all Sherlock related issues that he can’t even attempt to think of when Sherlock himself is anywhere in the same building.

“He’s still in love with you?” Selma asks, but it isn’t quite a question.

John doesn’t talk about Sherlock. Not like this. Sherlock has right to his integrity, even if he himself doesn’t seem to respect anyone else’s integrity.

“Something like that,” John admits.

“That must be… complicated.”

“Why?” John can come up with a million reasons why it’s complicated, but he still wants to hear what Selma meant.

“Because if you felt the same way that wouldn’t be an issue, so obviously you don’t. And that’s never simple, I guess.”

John does feel the same way. Loves. In love. He’s not attracted to him, but he does love Sherlock. As much as anyone who doesn’t really know anything about himself can love someone else, that is. Perhaps it’s just pathological codependency, John wouldn’t know. But it feels like… more. So what is the problem, then, since John does feel the same?

“That ever happened to you?” he asks, turning the tables.

“Me being in love with someone who doesn’t love me or the other way around?”

“Either.”

“There’s been people in love with me, I would say, but I’ve never really been in love with someone that way, no.”

“Never?”

John is surprised, because Selma would seem like the type to fall in love, head over heels. All the energy, impulsivity and unregulated emotions. All passionate.

“Nope. Unless you count fictional crushes. In that case I’ve been fatally wounded several times.”

Selma stretches her back, falls back onto the chair, looking a bit sheepish.

“I guess I just don’t feel things that way,” she shrugs, answering his unanswered question.

John isn’t sure what to say to that, so he nods, takes a sip of his now lukewarm coffee.

“Aromantic?” John asks finally, remembering the label since one of those early internet searches when he had tried to pinpoint what Sherlock might be. That was before he found that out for himself, and it turned out that he had been way off in all his assumptions. 

Selma shrugs again, lifting her eyebrows under her messy fringe.

“I like romance. Or, I like the idea of it. Well; I like to read about it. Some variations of it. At times. I just don’t experience it. I may or may not have had pretend girlfriends when I was younger.”

John cracks a smile at that unexpected personal detail.

“But you like boring women, don’t you?” Selma says with a grin, once again quoting Sherlock.

“You’re never letting that one go, will you?”

“Nope. So, do you?”

There’s footsteps approaching outside the door, and with that, John’s once again off the hook, because another colleague is peeking into the staff room, telling both John and Selma to get to their feet and manage the patient in room 3.

John gets up, trying not to think about the question that arises in his mind as he and Selma goes to see on the epileptic woman that is not responding to treatment.

There’s only so much one can think about the implications of what waking up beside your best friend means.

 

*

 

Selma is not due for lunch yet for a few hours, and John finds that he can’t face the thought of the usual small talk around the table with the other colleagues, so he goes out for a sandwich and a walk to pass the time.

That’s the thing with having different roles, John gathers. Different roles demands different kinds of energy to maintain. And right now, the dissonance between the good-natured doctor who can command and direct when the situation demands it, but who is otherwise the one who keeps his patience when the elderly man with Alzheimer’s won’t stop screaming and who will not be snappish even when all his younger colleagues come to ask him for his opinion about their patients and the man who’s enjoying pressing his best friend down against the bed and sodomise him while thinking about what it would be like if he were to hit that fish-belly white skin, if it would bruise if his hand were to press against that throat, Sherlock struggling helplessly beneath him. 

He loves Sherlock. He tries to mouth the words, taste them, as he leaves the A&E in search of the nearest sandwich shop. John loves Sherlock, but what does that mean when John is ashamed to even admit it to himself? And what is love worth when you take pleasure in that uncertainty in your… lover’s eyes? It doesn’t make sense. John doesn’t make sense. All his life, he’s fought against the destructiveness that simmers just beneath the surface of him. And now, Sherlock wants it. And John is giving it leeway.

Around him, people are on their way to and from lunch, tourists taking photos by the water. A woman almost bumps into him, and smiles as they avoid collision. John smiles back. 

He’s Sherlock’s best friend and colleague as well as a doctor, not a queer sadist with a strong codependent streak, but people wouldn’t see it that way if they knew what took place behind the doors of 221B, would they?

Swallowing, John enters a sandwich shop, finding himself just staring at the counters without seeing anything. 

It’s too much. Too much to take in and integrate to his sense of self. Too contradictory. Being in love with a man had been one thing, but actually taking in what he’s now doing to Sherlock on a regular basis is--

John finds the door, making his way out without having a thought on sandwiches. His pulse races, and he doesn’t even understand what’s happening. There’s nothing new, nothing that hasn’t happened before, this has been going on for weeks and it shouldn’t hit him now, but still--

He finds an empty park bench, leans against it, breathing. 

Sometimes, when he’s with Sherlock on a crime scene or out on a case, John feels like they are almost merging into one. Not one person, but one… unit. The way they end each others’ sentences and the way Sherlock just has to move his hand a bit while talking to a suspect for John to know just what to do. They work as one, in those moments, and it’s perfect, until the moment ends.

It’s terrifying. Fucking insane.

(Beautiful.)

A glance at his phone tells him that it’s almost time to return to the A&E, but John needs just a few more minutes.

He doesn’t care about conventions, but he’s worried about what people see when they look at him. He’s a healer who used to kill. He’s a lover who takes delight in inflicting pain rather than giving pleasure. He’s a straight man who’s wildly in love with another man.

He loves contradictions, but he hates being one.

It had stung, from the start, the awareness of what he was doing to Sherlock, and he should have listened to his instincts there. Not the instincts that told him to make Sherlock choke more before swallowing his come, but the instinct that told him that doing so was… not something you did. Not even when asked for it, because the person asking for it was clearly not one to recognise a healthy approach to anything. And John should know better.

His phone chimes.

_ Bring Steristrips from Barts. SH _

John quirks his mouth momentarily, wondering for a second if it’s something dead or something living that needs to be stripped together.

He starts making his way back to Barts, trying to think of anything but himself.

 

*

 

“Are you sure? Thanks a million, mate!” Darren exclaims, and John smiles back.

“I don’t really have much on, and I could use the money,” John simply says, writing down the new shifts he’s taken from Darren on his phone. He hasn’t yet learned how to use the calendar app, but he writes it in the note app, and that works just as well.

“Just tell me if you need me to cover for you any time.”

When John had heard Darren talk about needing to get a few days off and the staff manager not being able to find anyone to take his shifts, John had seen his opportunity.

It’s just as well, being away from the flat - from Sherlock - a bit more.

 

It will help.

 

*

 

As his shift ends, John is feeling a bit more relaxed. A few urgent cases had helped take his mind of things, and when he leaves Barts, it’s with a lighter feeling than the one he’d had during his lunch.

He’s got Steristrips in his pocket, and he’s heading home to Sherlock. His-- boyfriend? lover? partner?

John has no idea what term Sherlock would use, but then Sherlock generally avoids using any labels on himself, except for the ones that John knows not to be accurate, and then ‘genius’, which he knows to be accurate.

Would Sherlock mind if John were to call him any of those things? Not that John would, not if he could avoid it, but the thought is still an interesting one, and since it doesn’t revolve around John himself, John allows himself to continue thinking about it.

Sherlock, with his swooshy manners and his ridiculous hair and too tight shirts, does not seem to care about such fleeting things as being seen as ‘queer’, John thinks with just a hint of resentment. Although it’s clear to see that Sherlock’s bothered by his sexuality - or at least by some aspects of it - it doesn’t seem to be the sexuality in itself that bothers him as much as his fear of imposing it on someone else. John still doesn’t know what happened with that Samuel fellow, and perhaps they should really talk about it, but they are not ones to talk. Shame is something that both of them guards carefully, not allowing it to surface. Sherlock isn’t bothered by being queer, no, Sherlock is a statement of all things queer and unusual. Sherlock is, however, bothered by being other things.

After living with Sherlock for a year and a half, and sleeping with him for several weeks, John knows that there are more than a handful things that Sherlock will not wave around in the faces of others the way he does with his genius, his self-proclaimed sociopathy, his ignorance of things he deems irrelevant, his unusual interests and even his slightly flamboyant mannerisms.

Sherlock will hide any tells of whatever neuropsychiatric variation it is that he has unless the tells could be considered to fit into his eccentricities. John will never ask what exactly it is that Sherlock has, because he doesn’t have to, and besides, Sherlock is likely to present such a unique case of whatever he suffers from that reading up on standard manifestations is unlikely to be helpful to John. John can’t blame him for keeping this aspect away from the light of others, since Sherlock considers himself to be solely what he has made himself to be, and the notion of an underlying condition that has his nervous system wired differently really isn’t conducive to that notion. 

Sexually, Sherlock seems to be at war with what he wants and his own perceptions of what wanting that says about him. John gathers that someone, probably that Samuel fellow, must have told Sherlock that what he wanted was sick, and for some reason, Sherlock decided to adhere to someone else’s opinion on this one thing. Perhaps Sherlock had been less sure of himself back then. The thought of that is somewhat… dolorous. Sherlock tries to look assertive when talking about his preferences towards pain, submission and rough touch, but John has grown so accustomed to tell when Sherlock’s putting on a persona that it in itself has become a tell. Sherlock can’t ask for it, so he will instead state it as a fact, and John knows what that means by now.

A third thing that Sherlock will attempt to hide at all costs is his emotions. Or the fact that he has any, besides anger, frustration and curiosity. Even the giddy joy over murders is muted except for when Sherlock’s inside the walls of their flat. And while John doesn’t doubt for a second that Sherlock has emotions, and very strong ones at that, John has grown increasingly sure that Sherlock finds his own emotions incomprehensible and almost impossible to control or even name. Emotions seems to be something that confuses Sherlock, something that hits him like a bullet rather than progresses slowly like the rain. John often senses Sherlock’s moods before Sherlock himself does, and that’s saying something.

Lastly, Sherlock will hide any needs that involves others. The need for companionship, the need for his brother’s approval, the need for an audience (although he admits as much to John), the need for friendship, the need for… love? John knows that he himself has been a changing point in this regard, but it’s still something that Sherlock will try to hide, reflexively. Sherlock used to choose loneliness before loneliness chose him, John had once found himself thinking. A defence.

All in all, what Sherlock is ashamed of has nothing to do with being ‘a bit not good’, like it has for most people, in John’s opinion. No, what evokes shame for Sherlock is one thing; vulnerability.

John knows this, because it does take one to know one.

 

*

 

“I got your strips,” John says as he enters the flat, wanting to say something to break the silence before he’s even sure that there is any silence to break.

Sherlock doesn’t answer, but he looks up from his phone where he sits in his chair, a stack of folders beside him and his laptop open on his lap.

When Sherlock moves to put his laptop away, the sleeve of his dressing gown slides a bit up his arm, and John sees the marks of Sherlock’s wrist, the skin slightly chafed.

He swallows, the mix of emotions that that single image evokes making him feel like the calm that he’s gathered on his way home just went out the window.

Sherlock gets to his feet, and for a moment, John thinks that Sherlock might greet him with a snog, but Sherlock just takes the Steristrip from John’s hand and walks into the kitchen, taking something from the cupboards.

“What do you need those for anyway?” John asks, hanging up his coat and toeing his shoes off.

“Possible future experiment,” Sherlock says from the kitchen, and John makes his way into the kitchen, where the lights are turned off, as is Sherlock’s habit when he’s not using his chemistry equipment, since he seems to be averse to bright lights. Only the light from the window and from the sitting room illuminates the messy kitchen, and the man standing in it, putting away several dishes into the sink.

“I’m not sure I want any details,” John says, considering what Sherlock might need such things for.

Sherlock fails to answer, and John is at a loss as what to do next, so he busies himself with the kettle, finding milk in the fridge.

“Let me see your wrists,” John finds himself saying once he gets closer to Sherlock, looking for clean mugs.

Looking at him for a moment, as if considering, then presents his hands to John, palms up to reveal the thin skin of the inside of his wrists. The skin is chafed, but not broken. It will heal in a day or two, and the only reason John had even been able to see the marks from the hallways when Sherlock had been in his chair was because Sherlock’s skin was ridiculously sensitive, dermography and paleness making it seem even more reactive.

It shouldn’t be beautiful, seeing the marks left after what they had done. Thrilling, yes, but not beautiful. 

John takes Sherlock’s right hand, turning it so he can see the marks on the other side of the arm as well. While Sherlock follow his every movement with his pale gaze in the dim light, John moves to the side as not to obscure the light from the sitting room. With a finger, he traces the band of irritated skin, feeling the rougher surface contrast against otherwise smooth skin.

“We need something that’s easier on your skin if we’re doing that again,” John says, and it’s the first time he’s acknowledged that he’s expecting - hoping for? - a next time, and it feels like stepping out on the ice in spring weather.

“No,” the answer comes.

John tries not to show how the ambiguity of that one syllable is making him question his own put upon bravery when it came to openly referring to a ‘next time’.

They had fallen asleep together last night after John had slumped against Sherlock’s back, breathing heavily, his mind empty except for the need to get more air into his lungs and the heavy feeling in his limbs. They’d stayed like that for a few minutes, before John had shifted to the side to ease the pressure on Sherlock’s still bound hands. Then; John’s hands helping Sherlock fully up on the bed, Sherlock lying on his side, facing John, not saying anything, his eyes still not their usual mercury brightness. John’s hands, tracing Sherlock’s arm, feeling the way the restraint disallows the muscles to relax. His touch is lighter than it usually is, but Sherlock doesn’t flinch. When John eventually unties him, his own body clumsy after orgasm, Sherlock stretches his arms, rubbing slightly at his wrists, but he doesn’t move, and so John climbs back onto the bed and settles beside him. Sherlock, now on his back, has one arm over his eyes, and so John turns off the bedside lamp, and dark settles around them. A few minutes later, John drifts off to sleep, the sound of Sherlock’s breathing the last thing that registred. 

“I didn’t mind,” Sherlock says, and he’s not looking at John, but at their hands. “I don’t mind.”

Admissions, barely concealed by the neutral tone in which they’re spoken.

John’s finger, now tracing up Sherlock’s arm in a reversed mirror of what he’d done the previous night. John’s hand, circling Sherlock’s wrist.

Sherlock’s forehead so close that it’s almost touching John’s.

John’s finger, now joined by the other four fingers, finding its way to Sherlock’s nape, the dip between his tendons. Just a bit of pressure to the base of Sherlock’s skull, and Sherlock angles his mouth so that John’s can meet it.

A kiss, a press of lips, then a slide of tongue, opening Sherlock’s mouth to his. Sherlock letting him explore it, slowly, languidly, as John takes one step closer, allowing him an even better angle. His hand still holding onto Sherlock’s wrist, but it’s not a grip used to restrain as much as something to ground Sherlock with as John tries to grasp the concept of wanting both to ground and shatter Sherlock in equal parts.

To punish him for the turbulence he causes in John’s mind and to give him something to prove that he’s allowed to ask for it. 

  
It’s just dichotomies, and John knows that he’ll never be free of them.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter, the third one on Borderline Personality Disorder (or “Personality Syndrome”, as DSM-V has now renamed it), the following diagnostic criteria was used; 
> 
> Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
> 
> I like to include this quote instead of one from Wikipedia, as I really agree to Marsha’s view on this;
> 
> “Marsha Linehan, Ph.D., who founded dialectical behavior therapy, believes you develop an identity by observing your own emotions, thoughts, and feelings, in addition to others’ reactions to you. If you have BPD and the associated emotional instability, impulsive behavior, and dichotomous thinking, you may have difficulty forming a coherent sense of self because your internal experiences and outward actions are not consistent.”
> 
> (And interesting detail is that Marsha Linehan herself suffers from BPD. As someone who works with Borderline clients using Marsha’s methods every day, I find that fact to be one that adds depth to her descriptions and methods.)
> 
> ***
> 
> Borderline criteria in this chapter;
> 
> John has poor sense of self; he identifies himself through the eyes of others and through different roles. Being in the army might have been a very comfortable thing in this aspect, because there's a strong sense of belonging, order and identity in there. The same can be said about his current line of work; being a doctor is a strong identity, and being a doctor in a team the way you might be at high-intensity workplaces like the A&E, ITU, psych and so forth offer even more of a team feeling, because you often need to work as one. In this chapter, John also uses his knowledge of what others might see in him to make sense of who he is - he fears what others might think of his relationship with Sherlock if it were to be known that such relationship exists, because that is something that John himself can't quite manage to merge into his sense of self. The attributes that he thinks will follow such a notion is nothing he associates with himself, and so he feels as though he'd be losing himself if he had to. 
> 
> Something that John has a problem with in this story, repeatedly, is the ability to view himself in one way despite the fact that he often behaves in contradictory ways. He’s a doctor who was also a soldier, and he’s a lover who takes pleasure in hurting the one he loves. He’s a straight man in love with another man, and all those contradictions are almost impossible for him to handle, which might be explained by his low sense of self; it’s usually easier to accept the contradictions in yourself if you have a sense of who you are. Dichtomies are a common obstacle.
> 
>  
> 
> Then there’s the issue with self-esteem. If you have a strong sense of self - an identity - you’re more likely to develop that, because without it, you will find it harder to accept that you are worth something, because you don’t know who you are, and then how can you know what you deserve? (We all deserve good things, but that’s not an aspect our minds are likely to take in when dealing with the issue of our own worth.)
> 
> John also fears ‘his worlds meeting’ - Sherlock meeting the John he is at work and vice versa, because to John, these two people have very little in common. He’s afraid, constantly afraid, that someone will one day figure out that he’s no one, because all he does is play different roles depending on the circumstances (people with this symptom are often incredibly empathetic, because you have to be in order to adjust yourself to all these different situations when you can’t rely on your own sense of self in terms of how to act.)
> 
> We all experience this difference; the difference in the roles we have, but to people with BPD, these shifts might be more profound and leaving them feeling like they lack a core self, and instead are more like a fabric that soaks up all different colors and liquids that it comes into contact to, adjusting behaviours, emotions and beliefs depending on the situation at hand.
> 
> In one passage John mentions feeling like he and Sherlock act almost as one, finding it both beautiful, profound and terrifying. This is a phenomenon called ‘identity diffusion’, meaning that the person might sometimes have a hard time understanding where the other person ends and where they begin. This makes for quite a tendency towards codependent relationships, which is something that John acknowledges having with Sherlock.
> 
> I haven’t included much about John’s background in this story, but I think I’ve implied that he’s had a chaotic or abusive upbringing. This is rather common amongst people with identity disturbances, because being in an unstable environment where your actions will cause different reactions from your surroundings on different days makes it much harder to predict others’ reactions and form a sense of identity based on how others’ respond to you.


	14. Self-harm, part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said in Floodgates that I would return to this topic, and now it's time. Please, read with caution if this may trigger you. Self-harm part I was about the more general “why” of self-harm and didn't actually involve the POV of any person who had self-harmed. This chapter is the follow up on that, and without spoiling too much, we will get parts of Sherlock's “why” in this, as well as glimpses of “how”. The descriptions of self-harm are all in the past time, and I doubt this story will lead us to a situation that will make me write about this in present time more than I already have (if you count Sherlock's pinching/head banging, which I don't, since it's not tissue damage and since the motivation behind those actions are very different from those that made him self-harm in other ways).
> 
> This chapter is partially prompted by a discussion with pennypaperbrain about Sherlock's motivations for enjoying pain in sexual contexts, and if that in any way ties into his self-destructive behaviours and/or self-harm. I wanted to clarify that a bit, which is why this chapter, which I initially planned to execute in quite a different (and more disturbing) way moved here and why it took another form than I had planned.

 

 

“No.”

John's answer is firm, muffled only slightly by the proximity of their mouths.

“Why?”

John seems temporarily taken aback, his lips slowing down while he attempts to formulate an answer.

Sherlock is someone who always chooses his moments, and he has chosen this particular moment to ask this simply because John - already aroused and with his mind full of the things he wants to do to Sherlock - will react much more favourably to suggestions of the kind Sherlock has just voiced than he otherwise would. It's simple chemistry, and Sherlock will take a rational approach to reduce the chances of John's reactions being negative to what he’s suggesting.

(To what he’s inviting John to do.)

“It's not on,” John says after having pulled his lips away from Sherlock's.

John's body is heavy on Sherlock's, and John's breath is ghosting over his forehead, their limbs tangled and Sherlock's wrists pinned next to his head by John's hands.

(Sherlock's no longer reddened, chafed wrists.)

“Why?” Sherlock repeats, despite the risk of John pulling off of him, leaving him there on the sofa without seeing any of this through.

(It has been three days and far too many shifts at the A&E, John seemingly too tired to even consider anything remotely sexual, and Sherlock growing increasingly bored, and now, finally--)

“Your legs, Sherlock. That’s why. Not on.”

“My--”

Sherlock’s brain catches up with the meaning of John’s words just as he’s begun voicing the question of how his legs are in any way relevant to the question he has just asked.

_Oh._

(It still doesn’t seem relevant but--)

“You used to… do that,” John begins, nodding his head, most likely trying to indicate Sherlock's scar-covered thighs where they are currently pressed against John's own. “I won't have any part in it.”

His voice is more decisive towards the end, but he's not moving away from where he’s lying on top of Sherlock. His hands are still solid around Sherlock's wrists and his pulse still hammers hard enough to be felt in Sherlock's chest, and it's a sensation that makes Sherlock think illogical thoughts about arrhythmia caused by having not one but two sinus nodes.

_(A heart should only have one source of impulse.)_

“I fail to see what one has to do with the other,” Sherlock manages to say, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. “It wasn't like I suggested we'd indulge in any kind of bloodplay.”

At first, John looks at him like he's genuinely surprised that Sherlock even knows what bloodplay is, but within a second that expression fades and gives way for something more problematic.

“ _That's_ what it was?”

John's voice is incredulous _,_ as if the mere thought is so disturbing that he finds it almost impossible to believe.

(If that mere thought is disturbing, then Sherlock himself must be disturbing - no; _disturbed_ \- because while he wouldn't have let any of the men he's been sexually involved with do that to him, that doesn't mean that he hasn't thought about it in the private of his own room.)

“No,” Sherlock breathes, “it wasn't. Don't be an idiot.”

And John is looking at him _that_ way, the way that means that he's trying to figure out whether Sherlock's playing him or not, and Sherlock _is_ and Sherlock _isn't._

It hadn't been in the least erotic, the way Sherlock's hands had become steady first after the pain had surged through his nerves and the reality of what he was doing had settled in. There’s nothing sexual about… having been so desperate to regain some measure of control. Of having lost so much of his control. Yet there are things that Sherlock isn’t telling John, and his ‘no’ isn’t the whole of it.

(John will never know the whole of it, because the whole of it would negate so many of the things about Sherlock that Sherlock need him to believe.)

“Alright. Anyway,” John says, and Sherlock feels his own body loose a bit of interest in the proceedings, because thinking about the things John has brought up isn’t really conducive to arousal of the more sexual sort. “It’s not on.”

Sherlock could protest, could push the issue, because he needs an answer as to _why_ _,_ because frankly, John’s reason for refusing his invitation is ludicrous.

He had asked - or rather told John that he’d be amenable - for something, because John had said that once: _“I guess that’s something we should talk about”_ _._ And when Sherlock had talked about it the only thing John had said was “no”, and the reasons John had given for his negative were illogical.

Sherlock doesn’t, however, protest. He just lies there, something vile and hateful prickling his eyes and it might be anger or self-loathing or shame or resentment, but Sherlock only knows that it’s hateful and intense and that it’s John’s fault - or maybe it’s his? - and that this was never a good idea to begin with.

He’d offered John to hurt him. To cause him pain. Make him take it.

(He hadn’t meant like this. He’d meant _physically_.)

On top of him, John shifts a bit and lets go of one of Sherlock’s wrists. When his fingers make contact with Sherlock’s jaw, stroking it in what’s probably meant to be a tender gesture, things go white inside Sherlock’s brain.

The light touch tickles his skin and it feels like mockery and it registers as a jolt, travelling through Sherlock’s entire body, the light touch making his entire nervous system flare up and so Sherlock flinches, tossing his head away from the offensive touch.

“Sorry, I--” John starts, but Sherlock’s nerves are already too reactive, already in overdrive, and it’s all he can do not to kick John off of him, because this is too much is--

John looks like he’s about to back off, about to roll off Sherlock and as much as Sherlock wants that, he doesn’t want to give John any more reason to consider Sherlock’s crossed wires and his strange needs, and so Sherlock looks up at him, defiantly.

The silence between them is thick, Sherlock’s pulse thrumming through his body in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure.

“We should probably leave this for now,” John says unsteadily, and Sherlock isn’t sure if he means this _encounter_ or this _entanglement_ or this _discussion_ , but either way he agrees that they should, but he won’t, he just won’t let that be John’s decision to make.

“Leave,” Sherlock says, his eyes steady on John’s. “If this is making you uncomfortable.”

“It is,” John says, but he doesn’t move away.

Their breaths still close enough to mingle, both of them refuse to be the one looking away first.

“It is,” John repeats, and then he moves his hips pointedly, questioningly, still staring into Sherlock’s eyes, “and I’m not leaving.”

 _Mixed signals, crossed wires_ _,_ Sherlock thinks as his body reacts, rocking up against John’s body even though he’s not even that hard anymore, even though he wants to snap and push away and hurt more than he wants to shag.

(It might be the same thing for some, but it isn’t for him, just like what he’d asked John to do to him and what he himself had done to his own thigh with _a knife-a razor blade-a scalpel_ are not even related to each other other than strictly chemically speaking.)

(But perhaps that’s true for this as well.)

John doesn’t break their eye contact, but as he surges forward to bite at Sherlock’s lips things becomes blurry and too close, and Sherlock finds himself shutting his eyes as teeth drag along his bottom lip.

It’s not close to what Sherlock wants, to what he’d offered John to do, and it angers him to think that John might consider this some kind of compromise - a bleak substitute of things that Sherlock is yet to experience with anyone but himself.  


 

Pain, Sherlock knows, can be either useful, hateful or conducive to pleasure. He’s known pain to be useful since before he had any concept of such things, using it to ground himself and to make himself withstand other, far more unpleasant things. It had been a behaviour that he soon learned was not ‘good’, was not acceptable, so he’d done like he’d done with everything else that people condemned; he’d kept on doing it, but out of sight for anyone else.

(It helps. Just like cocaine and nicotine and dopamine. Endorphins help.)

It had never used to be about damage, or even about causing himself pain. The pain was just a mean used to regain control. His fingers would find their own way to the skin of his palm, pinching it to keep himself from lashing out or falling asleep. His head would hit the wall, repeatedly, just to make the chaos go away. He would bite the inside of his cheek just to feel that it was there, that his body was palpable and real and not dissolving the way it sometimes felt like it was dissolving when things had gotten too much and he was no longer sure where he ended and the rest of the world begun.

And then, puberty had happened and things inside him had gone from chaotic to pure cacophony and turmoil, and the _pinching-rocking-hitting-biting_ hadn’t been enough for the new chaos, no, it just worked for the old, recurring feeling of being _wiped out-overwhelmed-dissolving_ _._ Unlike before, he hadn’t instinctively known what to do to keep himself together, to calm the cacophony down or to regain a modicum of control. Then, in his late teens, he’d discovered that it was possible to cause oneself pain in far more deliberate ways, and that it was possible to tune out some of the unsettling things happening inside by overriding them with a pain that was far sharper and more distinct than what was raging inside.

The scars were an unfortunate consequence, nothing more, nothing less. The damage to the tissue had been nothing but collateral damage. He’d experimented with other ways to cause pain without leaving permanent damage, but by then his thighs were already lined with quite a few scars, and adding to it had seemed inconsequential. It wasn’t like anyone were likely to see that part of him anyway. The last white, healed lines on his skin were from when he had quit the drugs five years ago. It had helped when his skin had burned from oversensitivity and his nerves had been misfiring worse than ever as his brain adjusted to the lack of opioids.

It hadn’t ever been about pleasure. Nothing that even reminded of pleasure, unless a slight ease of the panic counted as such.

It had been about not losing control. It had been about finding a way to shut everything off and to shut himself off from things. At least for a minute or two. It had been about self-regulation, even if that’s something Sherlock loathes to admit.

With John, what he wanted John to do-- it’s the opposite of that. It’s about giving up control. It’s about experiencing every sensation, his senses heightened and his mind present. It’s about pleasure, because in this context, pain is somehow very close to pleasure.

At times, when there’s no case on and nothing to occupy himself with, Sherlock will do it to himself. Will lock the door to his bedroom quietly, knowing that John’s asleep or away but still being cautious. He’ll pinch his own nipples, clamp them, will slap his own skin and pretend that it’s someone else’s hand. With his hand on his cock, he’ll writhe from the mixed signals of pain and arousal and when he comes, the two sensations will be so merged together that he can no longer tell them apart.

He had wanted that with John. Wanted to know what it would be like when it wasn’t your own _fingers-hands-teeth_ causing the pain.

But to John, that’s apparently not acceptable, simply because Sherlock had used pain for other purposes over a decade ago.  


 

“Get undressed. Now.”

John’s lips has left his, and now John’s voice breaks the thread of Sherlock’s thoughts and makes something turn in his stomach.

Sherlock shivers at the loss of John’s body on top of his, cold air filling the space where John had just been, but John gets to his feet next to him, and Sherlock scrambles to get his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms off without leaving the sofa, watching John getting his own clothes off as well.

(They must have been rutting against each other as Sherlock’s thoughts had raced through his head, because he’s slightly out of breath and John is flustered, but Sherlock’s not more than half hard and it feels embarrassing, somehow. His body refusing to engage without his brain being in on it.)

Instead of immediately settling himself atop of Sherlock once again, John looks at him from where he’s standing, lets his gaze wander over Sherlock’s body, not settling anywhere, but sweeping over it steadily.

It’s a struggle, right there and then, not to curl in on himself, but Sherlock manages, because that’s what this is about.

(John knows it will make Sherlock uncomfortable. It’s part of what turns them both on about all of this, or it usually is; today it doesn’t feel like arousing in the least, because Sherlock’s already been exposed, humiliated and denied, and it hadn’t been within the bounds of what they’d - almost - managed to negotiate during earlier half-conversations.)

John’s face shifts, making complicated, aborted expressions that Sherlock finds that he can’t read, and then John is back on top of him, their skin touching and their chests expanding in tandem. Sherlock expects John to grab his wrists or his hair, an already established pattern in their encounters, but John doesn’t, instead allowing his hands to knead Sherlock’s shoulders, then pectorals, pushing his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth and pressing his pelvis against Sherlock’s.

His own hands, Sherlock finds, are on either side of John’s waist, holding - holding on - but not directing. As their naked bodies slide together, Sherlock is reminded of their second time together, because it had been here, on the sofa, and it had been like this - a bare, mutual rutting and rubbing together. Simpler and yet so much harder than what they’d done since then.

Lips breaking contact, and John leans his forehead against Sherlock’s shoulder as he breathes, pants, pressing against Sherlock, who’s pushing up against him, their cocks sliding between them with the aid of sweat and precome.

When John comes, adding to the wetness of their stomachs, Sherlock’s not yet close to coming himself. It’s strange, rutting against John, who’s clearly trying not to sag down too much against Sherlock, but to hold his muscles flexed to offer Sherlock friction and something solid to rub himself against. He tries, for a minute, to get himself close, but it’s not working, he’s too aware and too present and it feels too much like this is about him.

It doesn’t work, and Sherlock wants very much to be alone with his fantasies right now, wants to take his time to get into a headspace where he will be able to orgasm, but he doesn’t know what it would mean if he left John here to do so.

(John prides himself - or used to pride himself - on being a thoughtful lover, Sherlock knows.)

“Do you want me to--” John starts when Sherlock’s body ceases to push up against his own.

“No.”

“Can I--”

John cuts himself off this time, letting his words die out as he rolls a bit to the side and almost falls off the sofa, but he manages to regain his balance and his fingers find the mess on Sherlock’s stomach, sweeping through it with his index finger.

When John’s finger nudges against Sherlock’s bottom lip, it isn’t tentative or too light, but a steady pressure spreading a bit of semen against Sherlock’s already saliva-wet lip. Sherlock is motionless, his left arm keeping John from rolling off the narrow space of the sofa, his right resting against his own chest, feeling it heave.

Another swipe over the come on Sherlock’s skin, then John’s fingers return to Sherlock’s mouth.

“Open,” John says, still breathless after his orgasm, but there’s something very much intent in his voice.

Sherlock does.

And as two soaking fingertips invade his mouth, pressing inside and pulling slightly back before pushing further, Sherlock meets John’s eyes, then quickly averts his own gaze, already too exposed and too raw.

Bitter taste floods his senses and when John’s fingers make no move to withdraw, Sherlock lets his tongue swipe over them, slide between the two digits, exploring them. Beside him, John makes a sound that is somewhere between sated, intrigued and demanding.

“Oh,” John says then, raspy voice and fingers pulling back, pushing in.

It’s an act mirroring fellation, Sherlock knows, and so he starts sucking, hollowing his cheeks and letting John set the pace with his hand. It’s nothing like fellatio, though, because there’s no smell and also no actual genitals involved, but the thought of John reacting to seeing him do this is still--

His hand has found its way to his cock, and since John’s attention seems to be turned solely to Sherlock’s mouth, Sherlock wraps his hand around his erection, a few hesitant strokes before he finds that it’s working. With John’s hand once again collecting come from his stomach and pushing into his mouth, Sherlock’s own hand begins to work more determinedly.

When he comes, it’s with John’s fingers still inside his mouth and John’s other hand rubbing his nipple roughly, and the sounds he’s making-- John will hear, will be coherent to hear them without the haze of his own orgasm surrounding him, but the sounds slip out anyway and Sherlock’s hand eventually still, smeared with come and shaking ever so slightly.

After a few seconds, John’s hand withdraws.

Opening his eyes, Sherlock watches as John’s eyes flick back up to his after apparently having been looking down, looking at Sherlock’s cock, and Sherlock isn’t quite sure what to make of it.

He knows that John isn’t interested in that particular part of him, knows that it’s something that John might utilise but not something he’ll ever be attracted to, and it seems likely that it’s something he might never even get fully comfortable with touching.

Sherlock doesn’t expect that to change.

(What John is allowed to be - is slowly allowing himself to be - when they do this-- It’s more operative than the mere attraction to a particular set of genitals--)

(It's more.)

As John eases off of the sofa, stands up, and from Sherlock's position down on the sofa,  John's nude form looks strange and disproportionate. Sex chemicals buzzing through his bloodstream, Sherlock almost finds himself answering the odd, hesitant smile on John's face before he remembers that there's still something undisclosed and unsettling between them.

He settles for a nod. An acknowledgement, but not quite an agreement.

The sum of their entanglement.

 

 

Underneath the water surface, Sherlock's skin looks a bit more aglow than usual. Warmer. More golden.

An optical illusion due to how the water breaks the light, nothing more. Sherlock might be warmer here in the hot water, but his skin wouldn't glow from it.

People generally observe once single detail and draws conclusions from it without taking other aspects into consideration. Physics, sentiment or the ability to distinguish between different sorts of pain based on the motive behind it. It all becomes simplified in the eyes of others.

They assume. It's a dangerous thing to do, because you can only assume things based on what you know, and most people know so disturbingly little.

The broken surface of the bathwater makes the white lines on Sherlock's thighs seem wobbly and almost like they're in motion. There are currently at least 56 different scars disputing the smooth skin, fine white lines interrupted by a few wider, less neatly healed wounds. Almost from the start, he'd been careful to keep the edges of each wound together to promote minimal scarring, but at times it had seemed… less important.

Unlike his other voluntary encounters with pain, inflicting these cuts on himself had always been at least semi-planned. He'd held out, tried to manage for as long as he could, but that he'd end up doing it again had seemed inevitable. That meant he could be prepared, and so he only used clean knives or razor blades, not wanting to risk an infection.

He wasn't ashamed over what he was doing, because what he was doing made sense, chemically speaking. At the age where he first discovered the possibility of a more deliberate form of self-inflicted pain, Sherlock already had a basic understanding of pain-response and the psychological effects of endorphins, which made it easier, made it less a desperate act and more a planned strategy, or so he liked to think.

It was a functional way to keep anything else from bleeding out of him, he used to think. A simple matter of utilising the natural chemical reactions in the brain to his advantage.

(He knows now that it was never quite that simple.)

Tracing the scars with his finger, Sherlock attempts to imagine what John sees when he looks at this part of him.

Emotionally unstable. Broken. Pathological. Desperate.

What Sherlock sees himself sees is far more nuanced: traces of a strategy that's now abandoned.

This doesn't evoke any particular sentiment in him. It is what it is, and it's his skin, so it shouldn't bother anyone else.

That doesn't mean that he'd like anyone to see it. When it came to doctors, Sherlock had always pretended that he was keen on his integrity, hence refusing to disrobe, and his wishes had been respected, but then there had been a miscalculation, and when you're a junkie nearly dying from an overdose in a too brightly lit hospital, no one will pay you that courtesy.

Upon discovering the scars, what had been perceived as an accidental overdose was suddenly a suicide attempt, because apparently a few scars were more indicative of being suicidal than doing class A narcotics were.

Theorising without at all the data.

It's what people do.

(It's what John had done.)

As he gets up from the tub, wrapping himself in a towel, Sherlock looks at himself in the foggy mirror as he proceeds to shave, put on lotion and fix his hair.

There's a chemical similarity to the pain he wants - the one he's being denied - and the pain that had merely been a necessity at the time.

But that's all there is.

Unfortunately, Sherlock can't tell John this, because doing so would mean revealing the difference in motive between the two. And Sherlock is more than well-aware that others - not even John - find his motives for most anything acceptable, so he tends to keep such things to himself, storing them neatly in the structure of his mind, knowing that they're there and that they're untangled and labelled and understood, if only ever by Sherlock himself.

There might be other ways to convince John--

No.

It's something he'll not risk. Too many minefields on the way.

It'll be something that will have to remain his own pleasure, one that he will not share.

After all, he never thought he'd ever share anything physical - sexual - with another person.

Clearly, having something left that was just his would be something of an advantage.

With that, Sherlock steps out of the almost nauseating heat of the bathroom, making his way to his bedroom.

There are things that will only ever be yours.

(Every other notion is a sign of either pathetic romanticism or pathological codependency.)

 

 

“Could you define ‘low to moderate pain’?”

It's two days after the unfortunate discussion of infliction of pain in a sexual context, and John looks up at him from where he’s seated, and Sherlock’s impressed over the way John manages to make it sound almost as casual.

“Mild to moderate’,” Sherlock automatically corrects, not certain why he's even allowing this discussion to continue, seeing how the previous one had--

“That's-- would you care to elaborate?”

Waiting for a reply, John begins cleaning up the clutter on the sitting-room table.

They're having a discussion that they are both apparently determined to pretend isn't of any significance.

“Enough to release endorphins, not enough to cause permanent damage.”

“That’s still an awfully wide span. Care to try to be just a bit more specific?”

Sherlock wants to bite his lip, wants to look away, but he does neither. It’s a role he’s taken upon himself at this stage; the almost disinterested way he will respond to all those questions that might make John realise just what a--

“Why do you care?”

“I think I might have been... jumping to conclusions. Last time. So I thought-- well; I might gather some more data.”

John's voice is matter-of-fact and he's putting the dishes away, but Sherlock knows John. Knows that John dislikes conversations about things that may or may not be personal or sensitive, knows that John dislikes the fact that he likes to think about hurting Sherlock.

Sherlock puts away his laptop, leaning his chin in his hands, following John with his gaze as he speaks.

“I dislike any kind of burning pain as well as pain caused by constant friction or overly light touch. I am somewhat uninterested in pain that's more… mechanical than primal. Besides that, I’m amenable to test the limits of what I can take, but I find pain merely for the sake of it to be tiresome. It’s… It’s not just about applying pain. It’s about context.”

“And by ‘context’ you mean...?”

“Motivation.”

He leaves the words there between them, one more tool for John to put to use. John looks at him with a thoughtful expression, then nods.

“And it's not about what you used to--”

“Chemically speaking, there might be similarities.”

“But not when it comes to--”

“Motivation,” Sherlock finishes John's sentence, fixing John with his gaze.

John puts down the pile of books he's just picked up in order to put them away, then licks his lips, and nods.

It seems like the partial silence of the past two days have only been temporarily broken, because John nods again and then sits down in his chair, grabbing his laptop.

“Alright.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a definition of self-harm, see Self-Harm part I in A Study in Floodgates.
> 
> ***
> 
> In this author's note, I'd like to address some more specific aspects:
> 
>  **Re: self-harm and masochism.** I think that while it’s true that there are some motivations that are similar between Sherlock’s self-harm and Sherlock’s desire for pain in a sexual context, that is because he will always look for things to drown out the noise in his mind and he will always be intrigued by strong sensory input, but I very much believe that that are the only really strong connections between these two behaviours. And there’s one important distinction; the aim of his self-harm was to try to regain some control, while the aim of painplay is to lose it. He’s contradictory, but I also believe that these two things truly don’t register as the least bit alike to him, except for the neurochemical response.
> 
> In this story, I see Sherlock as someone who genuinely enjoys pain and/or humiliation in a sexual context just for the sake of the sexual (and psychological) thrill. It’s been something he’s desired long before any thoughts of deliberate self-harm, and it’s something he does as an indulgence, not as a last way out or a desperate act to regain control. He likes fantasising about these things, but when he thinks about self-harm, it’s more like an intrusive thought. I don’t believe that his sexual enjoyment of pain in a sexual context is in any way an unconscious way to make someone else hurt him instead of doing it himself. It’s not a roundabout self-harm (or a self-destructive behaviour in which he uses sex to punish himself, which isn’t that uncommon, but not the least bit true in this verse). It’s not a pathology. The fact that his brain is indeed a bit differently and that, to use a colloquial expression, ‘his wires are a bit crossed’ does perhaps play in, because he has a very favourable reaction to pain.
> 
>  **Re: self-harm and stimming.** (For more information about stimming, see Stimming in A Study in Floodgates). I let Sherlock make a distinction between his 'stimming' behaviours and his more deliberate self-harm. That's illustrates the way I see it; stimming might involve pain and harm done, but it's not as deliberate or as planned as self-harm might otherwise be. Besides, it's often something starting far earlier in life for those who have this type of stimming, and often it starts at an age before the concepts of 'punishing oneself' or 'controlling emotions' were estabilshed clearly in one's mind. Painful stimming rarely causes permanent damage, but there could be exceptions. But the way to approach these two different forms of harm - deliberate self-harm and stimming that involves temporary pain/damage - are so widely set apart that I wouldn't group them together.
> 
> Lastly; the way Sherlock used deliberate self-harm as a way to 'regain control' or 'ground himself' might be functional, technically speaking, but there are more aspects to it than that. Dangers, social stigma, the closeness to suicidal behaviour (not in all cases, but statistically speaking), unwillingness to form other strategies to deal with whatever it is one deals with by harming oneself and much more. I've been working with patients with self-harming behaviour for four years, and what my patients have certainly showed me is that it is very much possible to find less harmful ways to deal with what feels unbearable, but also that self-harm per se is very rarely the problem in itself. It's the reasons behind that need adressing.
> 
> Don't hesitate to seek out a competent mental health professional if you are interested in attempting treatment for whatever your problem might be - the self-harm in itself or the reasons behind it.


End file.
